Obama Sics IRS on Obamacare Holdouts

Nationalized healthcare was bad enough already!

9.29.2016

Republicans are criticizing the Obama administration for enlisting the IRS to help track down Obamacare holdouts in a move the GOP fears is “turning the tax agency into part of his political operation by enlisting it in the health care effort,” as The Washington Times reports.

Millions of Americans have opted out of signing up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act and have, instead, paid the penalty tax, soft-balled to the public as a "mandate." Those individuals are on file at the IRS and the administration would like the IRS to contact them to see if they would reconsider.

According to IRS officials, no private information would be shared with other agencies and this is just an attempt to send out a few letters to those who refused coverage under Obamacare.

The IRS released a statement saying the agency makes it a practice to inform taxpayers of other government benefits:

“This particular mailing is consistent with our practices and the tax administration requirements set forth in the law.

But Rep. Steve King (R-IA) thinks the move is a little one-sided:

We should use our federal government — the right hand, the left hand and other hand needs to know what the other is doing. It doesn’t trouble me that they do that [for health care], but it does trouble me they refuse to do that when it comes to immigration.”

As noted at the Times, King authored a bill to use information from the Treasury Department to locate employers who paid illegal immigrants and remove their tax deductions to keep them from drawing in illegals. The Obama administration has yet to back it.

However, other Republicans believe any effort by the federal government to access private information from taxpayers is a dangerous move.

From the report:

The individual mandate was supposed to balance out those customers by forcing healthy Americans into the insurance risk pool. But the tax penalty, which rises from a baseline of $95 in 2014 to $695 this year, hasn’t been a strong enough incentive.

The administration says it plans to promote the Obamacare exchanges among millennials through social media and community events while improving the HealthCare.gov experience on tablets and smartphones.

Yet its decision to target penalty payers — a population with a high proportion of young adults — is proving controversial.