The tax penalty I pay for renting my apartment dwarfs the ACA's tax penalty

[Recursion]

Using the tax code to incent behavior is nothing remotely new.

The average mortgage interest deduction in the US is about $3000 (that's from pre-crash numbers, though, so take that with a huge caveat). I chose to rent rather than buy in DC's market for various reasons (which, in retrospect, seems to have been the right decision), but that put me afoul of our home mortgage mandate, so I paid a $3000 tax penalty this year.

We want people to own rather than rent (even though that's not a particularly great idea in East coast cities). So we use the tax structure to incent that commercial activity, and to punish the lack of that activity. It's not a new idea, and the ACA's hand isn't even that heavy as these things go.