Last week’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that the individual mandate in President Obama’s national health care law was a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing power has triggered a renewed political debate in Washington over whether the provision is really a tax. If so, it violates Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. If not, then its constitutional justification is fictional.

But such semantic and legal arguments over this relatively small “tax” should not distract from the fact that Obamacare as a whole contains $813 billion in tax increases.