Obama's improvised explosive device

There is no doubt that President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill view the enactment of Obamacare right up there with Social Security and Medicare in the pantheon of gigantic legislative accomplishments.

After all, the battle for health care reform began 100 years ago. Since then, presidents of both parties have attempted to enact reform and failed. It’s a daunting challenge that has grown with the passage of time as health care has become ever more specialized and vastly more expensive.

Health care spending now consumes about 18 percent of the nation’s GDP and totals $2.7 trillion annually. In Washington, health industry lobbyists from the commercial health insurance industry, the drug companies, the hospitals, the medical schools, the physicians and nurses and the labor unions spend millions of dollars to protect their piece of the health care pie.

President Obama deserves credit for having been willing to try to accomplish what had eluded his predecessors. But he attempted health care reform at the wrong time and in the wrong way. After all, as he took office, the nation’s economy was imploding. Dealing effectively with that should have been his top priority, not health care reform.

In addition, by turning the writing of the bill over to the Democrats on the Hill, the president committed an unforced and fatal error. That error gave lie to his campaign promise to change the way Washington works. It alienated and radicalized the Republicans, and it gave the fledgling tea party movement the rallying cry it needed.

When the president signed the bill into law on March 23, 2010, he was cornered. He calls it health care reform. It’s not. In order to get the 60 votes necessary to pass it in the Senate, the Democrats had to sell out to the health industry that the bill was supposed to reform. The law is so complex that nobody understands it. In addition to its 2,700 pages, it now has 20,000 pages of regulations. The American people still don’t know what’s in it, and a majority of the nation opposes it.

What the president did accomplish was to create an improvised explosive device (IED) that exploded on Election Night in 2010. The president lost 63 House seats, more than any sitting president since 1938. Since then, the House has roadblocked the president’s agenda. The president’s legacy is threatened by the Frankenstein Monster he and the Democrats created.

But the Obamacare IED has a unique property — the ability to explode more than once.

Recall that the centerpiece of Obamacare is the individual mandate, the provision that requires the American people to purchase health insurance. That’s the provision that came before the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices ruled it was constitutional under the taxing powers of the Constitution.

Taxing power — that means the IRS! Obamacare will be administered jointly by Health and Human Services and the IRS when its main provisions go into effect in 2014. There are 47 tax and regulatory provisions that the IRS will administer. The inspector general of the Treasury Department has said recently that these new responsibilities are unprecedented and are going to lead to problems.

There is already reason to believe the IRS is overstepping its authority. The law authorizes tax credits and subsidies for health insurance purchased through state exchanges. But 33 states have refused to establish exchanges, meaning the federal government will establish the exchanges in those states. Without the subsidies in those 33 states, individuals would be exempt from the law’s mandate, rendering Obamacare unworkable in more than half the nation.

How’s the IRS proposing to deal with this? It has chosen to ignore the law and assert that the feds can provide the subsidies, anyway. Its decision is already being challenged in court. If it gets to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts will have the opportunity to redeem himself.

To monitor compliance with all of the personal data Obamacare requires, the IRS and HHS are creating the biggest personal information database in the history of the federal government. It’s called the Federal Data Services Hub, and it will centralize information about you from the IRS, HHS, Homeland Security, Justice, Social Security and the 50 states. The IRS will then cross-check data from the hub against your tax returns.

If the IRS determines that you haven’t played by its rules, Obamacare requires the IRS to penalize you. That penalty will begin at $695 or 2.5 percent of your household income, whichever is higher. The law prohibits the IRS from using liens or wage garnishment to collect those penalties, so it will reduce your tax refund. If you’re one of the 80 percent of Americans who receives a tax refund, you might want to rethink that strategy.

To attempt to deal with this enormous burden, the IRS has requested $440 million for fiscal year 2014, including hiring almost 2,000 more bureaucrats. The individual who has been tapped to lead this effort at the IRS is Sarah Hall Ingram, who previously headed the unit that targeted conservative group applications for 501(c)(4) tax status. As head of the now disgraced Tax Exempt Unit, she received $96,350 in bonuses between 2010-2012 in addition to her annual salary of $172,000. The truth is stranger than fiction.

The IRS has become radioactive. In 2014, the Obamacare IED is going to explode again. It ain’t gonna be pretty, but it’s gonna be deserved!

The Shadow can be reached at: EmailMe