Posted on 04/09/2012 2:46:41 AM PDT by Libloather
White House has diverted $500M to IRS to implement healthcare law
By Sam Baker - 04/09/12 05:15 AM ET
The Obama administration is quietly diverting roughly $500 million to the IRS to help implement the president’s healthcare law.
The money is only part of the IRS’s total implementation spending, and it is being provided outside the normal appropriations process. The tax agency is responsible for several key provisions of the new law, including the unpopular individual mandate.
Republican lawmakers have tried to cut off funding to implement the healthcare law, at least until after the Supreme Court decides whether to strike it down. That ruling is expected by June, and oral arguments last week indicated the justices may well overturn at least the individual mandate, if not the whole law.
“While President Obama and his Senate allies continue to spend more tax dollars implementing an unpopular and unworkable law that may very well be struck down as unconstitutional in a matter of months, I’ll continue to stand with the American people who want to repeal this law and replace it with something that will actually address the cost of healthcare,” said Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee for healthcare and is in a closely contested Senate race this year.
The Obama administration has plowed ahead despite the legal and political challenges.
It has moved aggressively to get important policies in place. And, according to a review of budget documents and figures provided by congressional staff, the administration is also burning through implementation funding provided in the health law.
The law contains dozens of targeted appropriations to implement specific provisions. It also gave the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) a $1 billion implementation fund, to use as it sees fit. Republicans have called it a “slush fund.”
HHS plans to drain the entire fund by September — before the presidential election, and more than a year before most of the healthcare law takes effect. Roughly half of that money will ultimately go to the IRS.
HHS has transferred almost $200 million to the IRS over the past two years and plans to transfer more than $300 million this year, according to figures provided by a congressional aide.
The Government Accountability Office has said the transfers are perfectly legal and consistent with how agencies have used general implementation funds in the past. The $1 billion fund was set aside for “federal” implementation activities, the GAO said, and can therefore be used by any agency — not just HHS, where the money is housed.
Still, significant transfers to the IRS and other agencies leave less money for HHS, and the department needs to draw on the $1 billion fund for some of its biggest tasks.
The healthcare law directs HHS to set up a federal insurance exchange — a new marketplace for individuals and small businesses to buy coverage — in any state that doesn’t establish its own. But it didn’t provide any money for the federal exchange, forcing HHS to cobble together funding by using some of the $1 billion fund and steering money away from other accounts.
The transfers also allow the IRS to make the healthcare law a smaller part of its public budget figures. For example, the tax agency requested $8 million next year to implement the individual mandate, and said the money would not pay for any new employees.
An IRS spokeswoman would not say how much money has been spent so far implementing the individual mandate.
Republicans charged during the legislative debate over healthcare that the IRS would be hiring hundreds of new agents to enforce the mandate and throwing people in jail because they don’t have insurance.
However, the mandate is just one part of the IRS’s responsibilities.
The healthcare law includes a slew of new taxes and fees, some of which are already in effect. The tax agency wants to hire more than 300 new employees next year to cover those tax changes, such as the new fees on drug companies and insurance policies.
The IRS will also administer the most expensive piece of the new law — subsidies to help low-income people pay for insurance, which are structured as tax credits. The agency asked Congress to fund another 537 new employees dedicated to administering the new subsidies.
The Republican-led House last year passed an amendment 246-182 sponsored by Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) that would have prevented the IRS from hiring new personnel or initiating any other measures to mandate people to purchase health insurance. The measure, strongly opposed by the Obama administration, was subsequently dropped from a larger bill that averted a government shutdown.
That $500mil is to cover 'free' bail - no?
So much for having control over “the purse strings”.
Communism is worse than herpes, cancer and having islamic parents all combined.
This is communism period designed to instill fear and servitude through its enforcers the IRS.
If they want a nationwide mob it will start when the IRS starts arresting protesters.
“...throwing people in jail because they don’t have insurance.”
Not to mention that it ain’t cheap having your own fully-armed SWAT TEAM!
(0bama >>WORST PRESIDENT EVER.)
I would say Obama is the worst FAKE President ever myself.
Either way, we have allowed our once representative republic to dive headlong into tyranny.
Who was it that cut future funding for Medicare by $575 billion?
Who was it that moved Medicare Trust Funds out of the "trust box" and into the General Revenue, replacing them with Government I.O.U.s? Who was it that expanded Medicare and Medicaid to cover many, many more people than it was originally designed to cover?
Furthermore, medical insurance benefits for needy people were to be financed from Federal revenues. 
Medicare extended health coverage to almost all Americans aged 65 or older. About 19 million beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare in the first year of the program. Medicaid provided access to health care services for certain low-income persons and expanded the existing Federal-State welfare structure that assisted the poor. So DEMOCRATS ... SHUT UP!!! You have no integrity!!!
Marxist dictators....they just keep going, and going, .....
bflr
450,000,000 rounds of .40 HST anyone?
The illegally paid salaries must be reimbursed by the workers holding the jobs.
Agree!
He is the “WORST” at so many levels.
I trust that the great untold story of the obama administration is the looting of the American people.
sfl
Succinctly put. And that’s about the size of it.
The un-winding/de-funding would not result in reduced numbers of government employees, Czars, or IRS employee reductions, period.
Once in place, the machinery is NEVER totally un-done, for ANY government/taxpayer-paid program.
“I trust that the great untold story of the obama administration is the looting of the American people.”
It’s been a bipartisan looting of the American Treasury ...and we are about to see the violence that will be required to deal with the consequences.
Who are domestic enemies of a “free” republic?
“Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter — by peaceful or revolutionary means — into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.”
“Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the power to make laws!”
“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”
“Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.”
“Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out every particle of socialism that may have crept into your legislation. This will be no light task.”
Socialists/radical socialists/totalitarians...they not only plunder, they slaughter.
Your post IMO is absolutely right on the mark. This is why Obama is pushing the envelope to get all the precedence set that he can before any ruling by the SCOTUS.
History shows us that precedence is almost impossible to break in our government. Getting enough representative agreement in our Congress to breaking an established precedent is like trying to herd cats.
It would take one “H” of a strong political personality to wrench enough arms, and persuade enough people even with a friendly Congress to toss years of Leftist accumulation of influence in our government. It appears we aren’t going to get that “personality” this go around.
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