'I hope people back home fully understand what this means,' he said. Rubio: IRS to 'come after' uninsured

Sen. Marco Rubio said Thursday that the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care law means that the IRS will now “come after” Americans.

“I hope people back home fully understand what this means, and here’s what this means: It is now unlawful for you not to buy health insurance, and if you do not buy it, you have an IRS problem,” the Florida Republican said on Fox News. “If you do not buy health insurance, the IRS is going to be on your back and chasing you. They’re going to take away your refund, they’re going to increase your fees, they’re going to come after you.”


(Also on POLITICO: Kennedy slams 'vast judicial overreaching')

Rubio argued that millions of Americans will face being “out of compliance” with the IRS for not having health insurance coverage.

“Somehow the Obama administration thinks that’s a victory,” he said. “That’s everything you need to know about that administration.”

The high court ruled Thursday that Congress did not overstep its power by requiring almost all Americans to buy health insurance. The justices ruled that Congress has the authority to impose the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate through its taxing power.

In his interview on Fox News, Rubio said he wants Democrats and Republicans to agree on a need to “start from scratch.”

“I hope that even the Democrats in the Senate will realize — I hope this is not what they intended, and will repeal this thing and let’s start from scratch, replacing it with some common sense approaches that somehow doesn’t put all of these millions of Americans at odds and at war with the IRS,” he said.

( See also: Full coverage of the health care reform decision)

Rubio, a first-term senator who won his seat in 2010, said the high court’s decision has put the politics surrounding health care “back where we were when I ran for office.”

“One of the central issues of the campaign was this real anger at the overreach of the Obama administration on this health care law,” he said. “I think this now becomes a central issue again.”

He added, “This is one more piece of evidence that the Obama administration is hurting economic growth in America.”

Rubio appeared on CNN shortly after and repeated that the decision could give Americans “an IRS problem.”

“It is a loss for America. Let me begin by reminding everybody what the Supreme Court decides is they decide whether something is a constitutional or not constitutional. They don’t decide whether this is a good idea. And it’s specific, and when they found that it was constitutional what they said was the reason why it’s constitutional is because it is a tax increase. Millions of Americans may now have an IRS problem as a result of the ruling,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley.

“This is now turning the IRS into an enforcement mechanism for Obamacare,” he added.

Rubio also said he was not concerned about the political ramifications of the court’s decision for Mitt Romney.

“Let me first mention that when Governor Romney was the governor of a state, that is the state policy. If you don’t like the policies of the state, you can easily go to another state, and the state, by the way, does not have the IRS,” he said.