What does the IRS have to do with health care?

The ill named “Affordable Care Act” (aka: Obamacare) has many parts that are downright terrifying. There is the yet to be named panel that will make far reaching decisions about our health care. I say yet to be named because although the panel members were supposed to be selected by this time it appears the President is delaying the appointments until after the election. No sense in drawing attention to a board of bureaucrats deciding what kind of health care you can get before an election.

And the 3% tax on every single medical devise sold in this country. It’s an interesting way to lower the cost of health care, tax all medical devices and assess that tax on total sales not profit, so even if a company has no or little profit it still is hit with this tax on every product it sells. Need a pace maker, it will cost you 3% more under Obamacare, need a wheel chair, knee brace, crutches, all 3% more thanks to the bill that is supposed to make health care affordable.

But nothing is more concerning than the agency that will be enforcing the majority of the Obamacare provisions is the IRS. Yep let’s get the IRS intimately involved in our health care. The extra work load will mean the IRS will hire 4000-4500 new employees with most of them working on enforcement. The IRS will be charged with making sure every citizen has “adequate” coverage and each employer provides “affordable” coverage. What’s “adequate”? Well no one really knows. We have to wait for the un-named panel to decide exactly what that means. And if the health insurance you have picked or the one your employer provides does not meet the yet named criteria, the IRS will assess a penalty.

According to a recent Fox New article by y Elizabeth MacDonald  the Taxpayer Advocate Office [TAO] (a Federal IRS overseer) states that tax payers will now be complied to share with the IRS.

    *Insurance plan information, including who is covered under the plan and the dates of coverage;

     *The costs of your family’s health insurance plans;

     *Whether a taxpayer had an offer of employer-sponsored health insurance;

      *The cost of employer-sponsored insurance;

      *Whether a taxpayer received a premium tax credit;

     *Whether a taxpayer has an exemption from the individual responsibility requirement.

Makes you warm and fuzzy sharing a lot more personal information with the IRS doesn’t it? To adequately determine if you have “adequate” coverage the IRS might have to communicate and share information with insurance companies, employers or other government agencies. Because your penalty for not having adequate coverage is based not on your income status but on your “household” income this means the IRS must not only track your earning but compile earning information on you household.

For small employers we have a $2,000 penalty if they don’t proved “affordable” health insurance. To help the employer understand if the health insurance is “affordable” by the government definition the government says it must cost less that 9.5% of the employees gross income. So for the employee we base weather his coverage is “adequate” on his total household income, but to determine if the employer is providing “affordable” coverage we will use employee gross income. 

Like everything involving the federal government and the IRS simple huh? And we have not even scratched the surface in understanding what is in the 2000 pages of new federal law. Speaker Pelosi was not far off the mark when she said “we have to pass the law to know what is in it”. So much of this law is left to be defined by federal bureaucrats we will not know what it all means for years.

By then it just might be too late.