The Internal Blue Cross/Blue Shield Revenue Service. Awesome!
“Since the I.R.S. also is the chief enforcer of Obamacare requirements, [Michele Bachmann] asked whether the I.R.S.’s admission means it ‘will deny or delay access to health care’ for conservatives. At this point, she said, that ‘is a reasonable question to ask.’ ”
— Bob Unruh, Why Obama Released Embarrassing IRS Bombshell, WND Exclusive, May 13
Yes, that’s right. You read the title of this post correctly. Obamacare turns out to be a single-payer healthcare insurance program, after all!
Or so says Michele Bachmann, anyway. And she certainly would know.
This is great news, in my opinion. But, I mean, who knew? I’d thought until now that the only role that the IRS plays in Obamacare was to collect the penalty, via the tax apparatus, from individuals who aren’t insured through their (or a family member’s) employer and who choose to pay the penalty rather than buy insurance in the private market. In other words, that the IRS role concerns only people who don’t have healthcare insurance, not people who do.
But apparently I was wrong. I haven’t actually read the statute, which is infamously long, and somewhere in it, it requires all healthcare insurance premiums to be paid to the IRS. The name of which, once the full law kicks in next year, will be the Internal Blue Cross/Blue Shield Revenue Service.
Yes, the agency will still collect ordinary income taxes as it does now. But it also become our healthcare insurer. Unless you are a conservative, in which case it will still require you or your employer to pay your insurance premiums to that agency. Or maybe just through that agency; I’m not sure which. As I said, I haven’t read the statute, so I don’t know whether this will be like the Medicare system, or instead the agency will forward the premiums to your chosen private insurer, at least unless you’re a conservation, in which case the agency might use your premiums to pay for daycare for the young children of liberals.
Or maybe I’m misunderstanding completely, because of wishful thinking on my part. Maybe instead, the statute requires the private insurance companies to get the agency’s approval before agreeing to pay a policyholder’s medical bills.
Yeah, that must be it. The statute requires the private insurance companies to get the agency’s approval before agreeing to pay a policyholder’s medical bills. It’s odd, though, that three years after the statute’s enactment, this has never been mentioned before. By anyone. Which makes that report about the Bachmann interview truly an exclusive.
Bev,
Ridiculing Bachman’s statements is shooting fish in a barrel. It isn’t sporting.
Well, the scary thing about Bachman et al. is that after they develop the trick of talking like this pretty soon it becomes “hard-wired” in their brains and they actually think like this. As do the millions who listen to them and learn to associate thinking like this with “proof” that there is a liberal conspiracy to take away their pfreedom.
Hi, Jack. Yeah. I should go back to taking on David Brooks, Ron Fournier and their ilk. Unlike Bachmann, they’re actually taken seriously by people who don’t fall into the category that Coberly’s talking about.
Beverly, perhaps you should less time on sarcasm and actually read the legislation.
For starters, EVERY American family will have to report health insurer information which will be stored in an IRS data base. Every insured will be reported by insurance companies. The IRS will determine who is eligible for exchange subsidies, and monitor every life change of anyone using the exchange.
Not to mention refund offsets without due process and collecting 18 different taxes and fees. And the larger health insurance data base ever constructed.
Granted Bachmann is a loon, but we should all be concerned about this massive grant of power to the IRS.
Or at least those of us who care about facts.
Oh, don’t worry about the massive transfer of power to the IRS. Congress will not give them the funding to exercise it. 😉
Oh, here is an idea for a constitutional amendment. Bills are currently read into the record pro forma. Nobody actually reads them before voting on them. Require that bills must actually be read aloud with a quorum present. 😉
Min
I am sure that would constitute cruel and unusual.
Rusty may have a point… but I am not sure I heard him hollering about the Patriot Act and all it’s evil spawn. The sad fact is that “privacy” as we knew it is dead. I don’t know what the government will do with all its information, but the direction is not encouraging. Except I am not sure that Rusty realizes that this is not a matter of “the government” versus “the private sector,” but is the government in service to the owners of the private sector.
It will not be the first time people were made slaves by those promising them pfreedom.
For starters, EVERY American family will have to report health insurer information which will be stored in an IRS data base? Every insured will be reported by insurance companies? The IRS will determine who is eligible for exchange subsidies, and monitor every life change of anyone using the exchange? And these things mean that the IRS will have the ability to arrange to have health care denied to conservatives (or ANYONE), how, exactly, rusty? ‘Cuz THAT was Bachmann’s claim. And THAT was what I was responding to.
Not to mention refund offsets without due process and collecting 18 different taxes and fees? I’ll mention it, rusty, long enough to ask how this gives the IRS the ability to have health care denied to conservatives (or ANYONE).
And the larger health insurance data base ever constructed? What the hell does that even MEAN? A database showing who has healthcare insurance? And this gives the IRS the ability to have health care denied to conservatives (or ANYONE)?
Of course, the Medicare database is pretty big, too. And THAT agency is known to regularly inquire into the claimant’s politics before paying the claimant’s medical bills. When it doesn’t outright contact the doctor or hospital and demand that the person be denied health care itself, if the person is a known Republican.
For finishers, rusty, maybe you can explain to me why it is that conservatives like can’t follow an actual argument, and instead of responding to the what the argument actually is, starts ranting about something unrelated to the argument and pretending that the other person actually said something related to the irrelevant response. This bizarre straw-man syndrome is ridiculously common among conservatives.
Bev,
I agree. It is ridiculous. However it has happened:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/17/irs-sued-seizing-60-million-medical-records/
A healthcare provider has sued the Internal Revenue Service and 15 of its agents, charging they wrongfully seized 60 million medical records from 10 million Americans
The suit also says IRS agents seized workers’ phones and telephone data – more violations of the warrant, UPI reported.
The complaint alleges the IRS was “invasive and unlawful” and stole access to intimate medical records that included patients’ treatment plans and therapies, UPI said.
It’s as unheard of as using the IRS to harass individuals and groups based on their political persuasion. Oh wait, that has happened too.
Big government rocks!
Rusty,
As you probably already know, one of the main reasons to expand Medicaid is to eliminate the disproportionate-share hospital (DSH) fund (aka charity care) that so-called “safety net” hospitals receive to care for uninsured patients. Once the Medicaid expansion program is fully up and running, the charity care program will be completely phased out, at least’s that the goal of ObamaCare — which one of the few positive things about ObamaCare, IMO.
But what you might not know is that these hospitals use these funds not only on the uninsured who are poor, but also on the uninsured who are well off in terms of either income or assets. You would think that you would have to be poor, or at least somewhere near the poverty line, to qualify for charity care, but apparently that’s not the case! I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of well-off patients having no trouble at all qualifying for charity care. Hospitals would rather have these uninsured patients sign up for charity care because it’s a lot easier for them collect money from the government than it is to collect money from a patient, sick or otherwise. Think about it: why go through the expense of hiring a collection agency to get money out of wealthy uninsured patients when it’s effortless and virtually cost-free to get the money from Uncle Sam?
People with plenty of income and/or assets having their hospital bills paid for by the taxpayer should be wrong, if not fraudulent, but evidently it’s not. Not at all, in fact. Hopefully ObamaCare will put an end to this seemingly fraudulent form of welfare for the rich, but I’m not holding my breath.
IT has happened, Sammy? IT? The IRS has interfered with some conservatives’, or just plain SOMEONE’s, access to medical care? Because that’s what IT is, in my post, which as I said to rusty, is a response to Michele Bachmann’s claim that Obamacare will make it possible for the IRS to deny people access to health care on the basis of their politics. Bachmann did not say that Obamacare authorizes that; she said that Obamacare will make it POSSIBLE for the IRS to do that, illegally.
My post points out that the IRS is neither a healthcare insurer nor a healthcare provider, and that its’ only involvement in Obamacare–and its only POSSIBLE involvement in Obamacare– concerns establishing who owes the penalty for failure to obtain private healthcare insurance, and then collecting the penalty from people who owe the money.
So please, Sammy, if that lawsuit you describe, or the article you link to, indicates that the IRS has ever interfered with anyone’s access to medical care–whether for political reasons or otherwise–do identify the specifics. Otherwise, don’t claim that the IRS has already done it. The IRS has never done it, because the IRS has no conceivable way to do it. And that won’t change under Obamacare.
But I do have to chuckle at your outrage at the possibility that the IRS may have violated civil rights by grossly exceeding the breadth of a subpoena and by violating federal medical-records privacy laws, just as I chuckled at reading rusty’s indignation that Obamacare allows the IRS to withhold the Obamacare penalty from your tax refund without due process! Or whatever it was that rusty was complaining about that the IRS could do without first according due process. To which I say: Grow up.
Apparently, what bothers the two of you is the particular agency–the IRS–that is at issue here. But here’s some news for you: Where big government REALLY lives is in STATE criminal and civil courts, thanks very, very largely to the stranglehold that the Reagan-era conservative legal movement has gained on the U.S. Supreme Court and on the lower FEDERAL courts. State courts routinely violate even the clearest and most profound procedural and substantive due process rights (“substantive due process” being a legal term of art that I won’t get into in this comment), sometimes (especially in civil matters) baldly disregarding their own state’s laws enacted by their state legislatures for the very purpose of ensuring procedural and substantive due process. But unless the issue concerns real estate property rights in zoning cases, or infringement on the commandeering of public property or events for the practice of religion, or discrimination against whites, or gun-ownership laws–or unless you’re a corporation–you need not apply (as the old adage goes) for relief in federal court.
Here’s a suggestion: Check out who it is–who the petitioners are, and who their lawyers are–that fill up the U.S. Supreme Court’s 70-or-so “cert. grant” slots each year. Year after year after year after year, many of those slots are filled by, yes, STATES, asking the Court to reverse a (rare) lower-court ruling that vacated a state-court criminal conviction achieved through some glaring violation of a federal constitutional right. And nearly all the other slots are filled by petitioners–corporate, wealthy-individual, or rightwing-organization petitioners whose petitions to the Court bear the name of one of a tiny handful of extremely expensive Washington, D.C.-based regular Supreme Court advocates.
An absolute hallmark of the conservative legal movement of the last three-plus decades is the ever-more-aggressive foreclosing of the federal courts to access by anyone but those with a conservative ideological agenda. Please don’t blather about big government big government and constitutional rights. You don’t know what you’re even talking about.
But Beverly
beating up on Sammy is so much like… like, like kicking a straw man.
I have to agree with you that your specific argument about the specific claim of Bachman is not reached by Rusty or Sammy’s brief in support.
Nevertheless, I worry about the government’s gathering data about us that it does not need, or would not need in an “honest” health care plan. Along with the “national security” information gathering about us, it puts the government into a position to do a lot worse than deny conservatives (the rich?) medical care. I think a time will come when we will be sorry about that. Or maybe we won’t, as long as they only do it to the je… er, conservatives. or is it liberals? gee, sometimes i forget just who the enemy within is.
and it’s not a case of feds v states or government v private enterprise… it is a case of consolidation of power that it may take five thousand years (i am thinking of Egypt) for us to get loose of, if then.
Sammy and Rusty may not be making the best case for their concerns, but if the dog is barking in the night he may be trying to tell you something he can’t put into words.
Let my conservative people go, Dale? Look, the profound loss of privacy in modern life is a huge concern–of mine and of a lot of other people’s. But the government’s determining who, under the age of 65, has healthcare insurance, in order to ensure that everyone has access to insurance and to some modicm of health care, is hardly the stuff of Orwell novels.
The federal government already knows who age 65 and older has healthcare insurance: everyone who is a citizen. It also knows who their insurance provider is: the federal government. And it even has access to medical billing information for everyone who has made a healthcare claim to that insurance provider. So the hell what?
The U.S. is the only democracy with an advanced economy in the world that does not have full healthcare coverage for all its citizens, either through a single-payer government insurance system or a government-overseer system involving a small number of private, highly-regulated private or semi-private insurers. Do the Australians live in an Orwellian society? The Swiss? The Germans? The Israelis? The Canadians? The French? The Dutch? The Norwegians? The Japanese? The British? The Austrians? Really??
If Sammy and Rusty want to argue their case, they should do it in their own open-thread posts and specifically identify what it is that they fear or are angry about, and why. They should not pretend that I, or for that matter, Michele Bachmann, has said something that neither of us has said.
Bev,
I thought your post was that it was IMPOSSIBLE, LUDICROUS, that the IRS would possibly be political.
Why do you think the IRS took the medical records of 10 million people? Just for giggles….. or to use them? What is to stop the IRS from handing over this information, along with helpful suggestions., to whomever is receiving this IRS money?
Having control over peoples’ healthcare is the ultimate power. All you have to do is have the vaguest suggestion that, say, donating to the Tea Party will affect your place in the inevitable queue, and viola, dissent evaporates.
You may trust that the government is a benevolent entity, but that belief is based on very little evidence. Especially with the news of the IRS targeting conservative groups, and auditing returns of donors.
Bev,
IRS Audited Conservative Women’s Group
“My work for the Palin campaign was done with our attorney’s advice, everything done by the book every step of the way,” she added.
It was not long after that first phone call from an IRS agent that two more agents appeared at Easton’s organization’s headquarters in Herndon, Virginia, to conduct an in-person interview and demand a tour of the building. “Soon two IRS agents marched into our office and conducted an interview of me here in our Herndon Headquarters with our attorney present, and the IRS agents asked a series of questions like – what does the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute do?” Easton said. “After the interview they asked for a tour of our headquarters which our attorney gave them. When they came to my office door the male agent looked at a large photograph on my office wall of me with President Reagan (who I worked for during the 8 years of his Administration) and his eyes widened and his jaw dropped in dismay.”
Then, Easton said the IRS made seven separate requests for “massive amounts of documents,” the first request being for a “List of contributors and Amounts.”
Easton said she and her attorneys fought against giving that information up, and ultimately did not give it up. “We vigorously defended the names of our supporters from the intrusive IRS,” she said. “But our supporters are such tremendous Americans and were worth the effort to preserve their privacy.”
The IRS demanded 2009 documents after the 2008 ones, she noted too. Ultimately, the entire process took away from their ability to be effective in their core role: promoting conservative women.
“To comply with the seven massive document requests from the IRS, the Institute had to provide boxes and boxes, reams of documents (for example they made us provide copies of bank statements, broker statement, check registers, schedule of accounts payable, schedule of accounts receivable, credit card statements and on and on),” Easton said. “This took the greater part of 2011 and cost tens of thousands of dollars to comply with the IRS demands. And naturally, greatly decreased the time we could spend promoting conservative ideas.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/19/IRS-audited-conservative-women-s-group-too
This would be the same Breitbart that “forgot” to mention some tapes were edited? Ok, let us make the (huge) assumption this is an honest account of what happened. A 501 c4 is supposed to be mostly not political. How is the IRS supposed to determine if an organization is 51% not political and 49% political? Note that she is working for Palin, but this organization is not supposed to be primarily political. Does that pass the smell test?
Steve
A few things really strike me about your two posts, Sammy, but the most glaring is that it did not occur to you as you wrote that second comment that the woman quoted in the Breitbart piece was admitting the sole or main purpose of her organization was one that, under the law, precludes the organization from receiving tax-exempt status and therefore from keeping the identity of its donors secret.
The IRS controversy broke more than a week ago, Sammy. Do you really still not know that organizations whose primary purpose is to assist particular candidates do not qualify for status as a 501(c)(4) organization–tax exempt and donor secrecy?
Most of these organizations try to disguise their real purpose. But this woman indicated outright that her organization was violating the law by filing an application for 501(c)(4). It’s fraud, Sammy. Yet she’s complaining that the IRS stopped the fraud and instead enforced the law? Too bad she and the other top people there weren’t prosecuted.
As for your other comment, I’m not surprised that you thought my post was that it was IMPOSSIBLE, LUDICROUS, that the IRS would possibly be political. Most of the conservatives who rage in the comments sections of blogs and media articles are unable to follow even the most clearly stated liberal arguments, because they don’t understand the concept of narrow, specific facts or points. You folks are like robots. You see some word or name or phrase that is on your target list and launch into a raging monologue of talking points, irrespective of what the post you’re ostensibly responding to actually said ABOUT that word or name or phrase.
I did not say that it is impossible that the IRS would be political–i.e., that it took actions for political reasons. It is illegal, but it did happen during Watergate. It does not appear that that is what happened in this case; it appears that the people involved were trying to enforce the 501(c)(4) law, and in trying to enforce the specifics of that law, created generic categories that were improper and that they did this because most of the sudden huge influx of these applications were from rightwing organizations. How they went about this was ludicrous, in my opinion and in the opinion of just about everyone else. But it does not appear to have been politically motivated and does not appear to have been illegal.
A big problem here is the use of the word “targeted” to describe what happened, because that word suggests, incorrectly here, that the IRS launched investigations out of the blue, rather than that it was responding to applications for tax-exempt/donor-identification-exempt status, which was what did happen.
But what I said in my post was not about that AT ALL. It was about Bachmann’s claim that Obamacare turns the IRS into a medical insurer or a medical provider or something, or would in some other way–issuing cease-and-desist orders, maybe?–interfere with people’s access to health care. I said that was ludicrous. It IS ludicrous, Sammy.
As for your question about why I think the IRS obtained access to the medical records of 10 million people, I’ll say, first, that I think the chance that that claim is accurate is small. A better question is why the Washington Times didn’t identify the plaintiff healthcare insurer in the case? Unless the complaint is under seal–which is highly unlikely–then it’s a matter of public record. So why isn’t the insurance company named in the article? My guess is that, then, reporters for other news media would check out the complaint and describe the allegations accurately. And that the chance that the seizure of the targeted employee’s work computer gave the IRS access to the insurance company’s database of medical records for 10 million premium holders is, like, nil. Did the IRS seize the company’s mainframe? Didn’t think so. Does the IRS have the company’s passwords to get into the mainframe system? Didn’t think so.
But I’m curious, Sammy. You seem to have some idea of why the IRS would want the medical records of 10 million people, and that I too would have some idea of why. I don’t. If you actually do, why not fill us in?
Bev,
What to make of the political scandals that are dominating the headlines and forcing the Obama administration into Nixonian damage control? Technology is finally doing to big government what it has done to big business, big media and other institutions that once could operate with nearly full control over information. The government is losing the ability to manipulate information to avoid accountability.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324767004578489033727977330.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
For access to the truth, he internet is our savior
Idaho-based businessman Frank VanderSloot, who gave $1 million to Mitt Romney’s Super PAC in the last election, told Breitbart News he was audited three times last year and investigated a fourth. VanderSloot was personally audited by the IRS, as was his business. The Department of Labor audited his business too, and a staffer for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations appeared in his town of Idaho Falls, Idaho, seeking legal records about him.
All of this happened almost immediately after President Obama’s re-election campaign put him on what has become colloquially known as Obama’s “enemies list.” On April 20, 2012, Obama’s campaign published statements about eight Romney donors, including VanderSloot, and argued that they are “a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” and many “have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans.”
Within 10 days of the campaign publishing that list, Michael Wolf, then a staffer for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, appeared in Idaho Falls, Idaho, seeking legal records about VanderSloot. Eight weeks after the list was published, VanderSloot and his wife Belinda were told by the IRS their personal finances were being audited. One week after that, President Obama’s Department of Labor commenced an audit on VanderSloot’s company VanderSloot Farms. Then, a couple months later, in September, the IRS commenced an audit on another of VanderSloot’s companies, RBH Idaho.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/19/Businessman-Frank-VanderSloot-I-was-audited-twice-by-IRS-once-by-DOL-investigated-by-Senate-staffer-after-giving-1-million-to-Romney-Super-PAC
I don’t suppose there were entries in those returns that raised red flags about the legitimacy of the returns? And if so how would you possibly know?
I get it, Sammy. The way to get away with any illegality if you’re wealthy is to donate a lot of money to the campaign of the out-of-power presidential nominee. That way when a legitimate investigation is begun, your political and ideological compadres cry foul in an attempt to scare the government into backing off. So your candidate doesn’t even have to win in order for you to have de facto legal immunity from illegality. You just have to have the likes of Breitbart.com claim political targeting.
What makes you sound so glaringly ridiculous in that comment is that you say that the Breitbart report says that this person was investigated AFTER published reports of illegality by him. Why, exactly, should he not have been investigated if there was reason to believe he acted illegally? Because he was a prominent Romney supporter and donor?
I think I’ll rob a few banks in early 2016 and donate some, but not all, of the money to the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign–and let Breitbart know about it.
Beverly
I hate to be confused with sammy.
I am used to sammy not quite having the facts, and i think it is fine you should point out the lapses in his argument.
on the other hand i worry about the government creating a system of “deep information” about all of us. I think i am way too late. Nevertheless i wish you could see the potential… and the fact that there are ways “health care” could be managed without providing the government detailed medical records.
i am such a paranoid ultra conservative jerk that when the doctor’s office asks for my social security number i either walk out or leave the line blank. has saved me thousands and thousands of dollars over the years.