White House Diverts $500 Million to IRS For ObamaCare Implementation

Brian Koenig | The New American | April 10 2012

The Obama administration is quietly steering about $500 million to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to help bolster the President’s healthcare overhaul, despite efforts in the Supreme Court to strike down the law. The half-billion-dollar transfer is only a snapshot of the IRS’s total ObamaCare implementation spending, and it is being siphoned outside of the traditional appropriations process.

The tax agency has a role in several provisions of the law, including the controversial individual mandate now being examined in the Supreme Court. It is also responsible for a catalog of new fees and taxes that will require the hiring of more than 300 new employees to cover those changes — such as new fees on drug manufacturers and insurance policies. The IRS will also manage the most costly provision of the healthcare law, the subsidies (structured as tax credits) for poor families to buy health plans. The agency is requesting funding for another 537 new workers to supervise those subsidies.

Republicans claimed during congressional discussions over healthcare that the IRS would also have to hire hundreds of new agents to enforce the individual mandate and jail those who don’t have insurance.

Of course, this is just a glimpse of the bureaucracy that President Obama’s healthcare scheme will hatch. James Gattuso and Diane Katz of the Heritage Foundation recount in their 2012 “Red Tape Rising” report that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has planned 133 new rules relating to ObamaCare. However, these rules aren’t coming by way of just the HHS. Gattuso and Katz explained:

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