IRS to Gain Power From the Health Care Bill

David J. Hentosh
Thomas Jefferson Club Blog
March 19, 2010

	Under this health care bill, penalties for those refusing to buy insurance will be collected by the IRS.

The expansion of government that will occur if the current health care bill is passed is enormous. Not only will government bureaucracy for the administration of health care cause growth, even a limited student loan bill attached to it will require additional staffing (http://tinyurl.com/y9uvdov). Ominously, however, the IRS will also require an expansion of size and power with the passage of this bill (http://tinyurl.com/yheazuh).

Under this health care bill, penalties for those refusing to buy insurance will be collected by the IRS. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the IRS will require approximately 17,000 more employees and $10 billion over the next 10 years to handle the workload.

This bill gives the IRS power to confiscate any federal tax refunds to cover the penalties and it is conceivable that further means of collecting penalties could become even more intrusive. The IRS has been accused of having, and wielding, too much power already, so this expansion will only exacerbate that problem.

Obama promised jobs for the American people. This health care bill may deliver more on that promise than anything else he has done, which has been very little. The problem is that all these jobs will be added to an already bloated government at taxpayers’ expense as that taxpayer base continues to dwindle in a struggling economy.

If the CBO could estimate more closely the actual employment growth that will occur and add in the waste and fraud inherent in all government institutions, it would almost certainly find the projected cost to be much higher than $10 billion over 10 years. There is, unfortunately, no way to estimate the increase in power that this will bring to the IRS and that could be more frightening than the cost.

This article was posted: Friday, March 19, 2010 at 6:08 am

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