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| A sign identifies the Internal Revenue Service building on Constitution Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., Jan (Bloomberg: Dennis Brack) (Bloomberg) |
There's
been a lot of discussion about the new and powerful federal agencies
that would be created by the passage of a national health care bill.
The Health Choices Administration, the Health Benefits Advisory
Committee, the Health Insurance Exchange — there are dozens in all.
But if the plan envisioned by President Barack Obama and
Congressional Democrats is enacted, the primary federal bureaucracy
responsible for implementing and enforcing national health care will be
an old and familiar one: the Internal Revenue Service. Under the
Democrats' health care proposals, the already powerful — and already
feared — IRS would wield even more power and extend its reach even
farther into the lives of ordinary Americans, and the
presidentially-appointed head of the new health care bureaucracy would
have access to confidential IRS information about millions of
individual taxpayers.
In short, health care reform, as currently envisioned by Democratic
leaders, would be built on the foundation of an expanded and more
intrusive IRS.
Under the various proposals now on the table, the IRS would become
the main agency for determining who has an "acceptable" health
insurance plan; for finding and punishing those who don't have such a
plan; for subsidizing individual health insurance costs through the
issuance of a tax credits; and for enforcing the rules on those who
attempt to opt out, abuse, or game the system. A substantial portion of
H.R. 3200, the House health care bill, is devoted to amending the
Internal Revenue Code of 1986 in order to give the IRS the authority to
perform these new duties.