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In my post 83 in this thread I pasted the part which is the general statement of the statute with respect to the individual mandate.

Again, I do not believe the individual mandate imposes a “tax.” In this respect, I agree with Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito and I disagree with Roberts.

As the four dissenters wrote: “For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it.”

To quote further from the dissent:

“Finally, we must observe that rewriting §5000A as a tax in order to sustain its constitutionality would force us to confront a difficult constitutional question: whether this is a direct tax that must be apportioned among the States according to their population. Art. I, §9, cl. 4. Perhaps it is not (we have no need to address the point); but the meaning of the Direct Tax Clause is famously unclear, and its application here is a question of first impression that deserves more thoughtful consideration than the lick-anda-promise accorded by the Government and its supporters. The Government’s opening brief did not even address the question—perhaps because, until today, no federal court has accepted the implausible argument that §5000A is an exercise of the tax power.”

So in order to see it as a tax, one has to reformulate it from the way it was in fact written. The dissent did not try to reformulate it, because they judged that it was not a tax.

Roberts in his opinion reformulated it as “a tax on not obtaining health insurance.”

I contend there is no such thing as “a tax on not doing something.”

Instead, it is in reality a tax on you UNLESS you do the thing specified.

And what that is, is a direct tax (subject to an exemption) which in this case is unconstitutional because it is not apportioned.