Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the mandate in President Obama’s health care reform functions as a tax, making it constitutional under the federal government’s taxing power. Republicans and conservative media figures immediately jumped on this point, accusing the Obama administration of a massive tax hike. This puts Mitt Romney, the GOP’s presidential candidate, in an awkward spot. He signed precisely the same kind of mandate into law in a health care reform bill in Massachusetts, and his top campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom has explicitly insisted that mandate was not a tax.

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Last week, conservatives responded to the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act by issuing flamboyant denunciations of the the justices and the court. Glenn Beck labeled Chief Justice John Roberts a “coward,” a New Hampshire Tea Party leader said he hopes the justices in the majority contract cancer, and prominent GOP-aligned websites claimed that Roberts’ epilepsy medication drove him to endorse the individual requirement.

But Fox News’ resident psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow may win the prize for the most outrageous reaction. In a column posted on FoxNews.com and during an interview Monday afternoon on the network, Ablow claimed that the court’s decision will “iInfantilize” Americans:

ABLOW: [T]oday it could be healthcare, tomorrow it could be a hybrid vehicle that you are penalized financially for not buying. It takes control of your behavior in the way that a parent would of a child, and it diminishes us in terms of our autonomy and ability to achieve things even for liberty on the world stage, quite literally.

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): You say it’s making Americans believe that they are weak. How?

ABLOW: It absolutely infantilizes Americans, because listen, even adolescents or younger kids, they dream of the day when they are in charge of their own money…. What it does is deposits us back as children, when economically more than ever we need to be adults.

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Ablow went on to argue that requiring people to take personal responsibility for their own health care spending “can make citizens see themselves as serfs who actually have no right at all to the money they earn, and keep it only when it suits the federal government.” “With Egypt in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, with Iran building nuclear weapons and with Europe facing economic calamity, the last thing we need are lessons from Washington in how to be weak individuals,” he warned.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, Republican governors are considering refusing billions in Medicaid funds which promise to insure millions of lower-income Americans without health care. The Court found that while the Medicaid provision is constitutional, the federal government cannot take away federal funds from states that refuse to open the program to more residents.

A ThinkProgress survey reveals that ten GOP governors have said definitively that they will not accept the funds, while 19 are still considering other options. Sixteen states, all with Democratic governors, have committed to expanding their programs:

Starting in 2014, the Affordable Care Act expands Medicaid, the massively popular program which makes health insurance available for lower-income Americans. For the first three years, the federal government covers 100 percent of the expansion costs. After five years, the federal government finances 90 percent of the expanded population.

Not a single Republican governor has pledged to accept the new Medicaid funds and three Democrats are also considering turning down the money. In total, these states would give up $291.4 billion in federal funds and leave 10,297,221 Americans uninsured.

– Ben Sherman

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, Republicans adamantly opposed to the Affordable Care Act are suddenly being forced to reassess their positions, and take action. Some states — Texas, Florida, Arizona, South Carolina, and Wisconsin — have said they will not yet set up the parts of the health care law that they do not support. Those states will wait, though for what is unclear.

Other state legislators are sucking up their anger at the health care law and getting down to business. States have until January 1, 2014 to set up health care exchange programs for their residents. If they don’t meet that deadline, the federal government will set up the exchange in their stead.

Here are some of the Republicans who are re-charting their course because of the Supreme Court’s decision:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R): Christie vetoed the health care exchange program that his state legislature set up, saying he would wait until the health care decision came down from the Supreme Court. Politicians speculated that this was a signal to Mitt Romney that Christie was ready to be Vice President. Now that the court has upheld the law, Christie said he will unhappily meet the deadline for the exchanges, much to the chagrin of his right-wing supporters.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R): Snyder will begin implementing the exchanges immediately, though begrudgingly. Michigan Republicans have delayed funding the process for as long as possible, and now, with the clock running down, Michigan may need to seek help from the federal government to implement the law.

Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna (R): McKenna was one of the state representatives suing for Obamacare to be struck down. But this week, he says he is embracing the health care law. McKenna, who is running for governor in Washington, promised the health care exchanges and Medicaid expansion would both be implemented. McKenna has said “[t]here are a number of good provisions in this law that ought to be maintained.”

States are still processing what to do, and many have been silent on what form implementation will take. Other states — those run by Democratic legislatures — are well on their way to implementation and will likely meet the January 1, 2014 deadline.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are renewing their attacks against reform law by claiming that it will harm health care. On Sunday, Carly Fiorina — a Mitt Romney surrogate and a cancer surviver — fear mongered against the law, telling Candy Crowley on CNN’s State of the Union that Obamacare would have undermined her access to medical services:

FIORINA: As a cancer survivor, I will also say this. It terrifies me that the survival rates for breast cancer, which is what I had, are so much worse in the U.K. and Canada. Why? Because they don’t focus on prevention and aggressive detection in the same way we do.

CROWLEY: There’s prevention in the new bill, right?

FIORINA: The new protocols that have come down as a result of Obamacare would have been very deleterious to my personal health.

Watch the interview:

But Fiorina is wrong that the Affordable Care Act would have limited access to breast cancer screenings or hurt her cancer treatment. For one thing, Obamacare requires insurers to cover preventive services — like mammograms — at no additional cost and so far, more than 45 million women have taken advantage of the provision. Additionally, the health care reform law ensures that insurance companies cannot deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions, so cancer survivors — like Fiorina — cannot be denied coverage. The law also ensures that patients do not have to pay co-pays for cancer screenings.

Fiorina last used her own personal health status to misrepresent the measure in 2009, as a Senate candidate in California. She claimed that the U.S. Preventive Task Force’s recommendation would deny mammograms to women. “Do we really want government bureaucrats rather than doctors dictating how we treat things like breast cancer?” Fiorina asked. But her claims were incorrect: the panel’s recommendations were only guidelines and had no authority to “decide what preventive measures are paid for or not.”