(NRCC)

Congressman Barrows Plan: Put the IRS in Charge of Your Healthcare. Fed Up?

banner on mobile billboards launched this week by the National Republican Congressional Committee

The NRCC this week sought to explicitly tie the Internal Revenue Service scandal to the presidents health-care law, targeting four possibly vulnerable Democratic lawmakers with mobile billboards in their congressional districts.

The lawmakers are John Barrow of Georgia, Ann Kirkpatrick and Ron Barber of Arizona and Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota. Barrow and Peterson would seem to be odd targets because both voted against the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

But the NRCC justifies the attack because both men have voted against repealing the law. (The lawmakers say they would like to fix a bad law, rather than toss it out completely.)

But what about the key claim that the IRS would be in charge of a persons health care? Does that make sense? Lets take a closer look.

The Facts

Until the scandal erupted over the IRSs targeting of conservative groups applying for a tax-exempt status, few people had paid much attention to IRSs role in the health care law, including the NRCC. But it has an important role in implementing the law, particularly in collecting the taxes and penalties that help fund the expansion of health care to millions of Americans.

Revenue provisions contained in the legislation are designed to generate $438 billion to help pay for the overall cost of health care reform, said the Treasury Department Inspector General in a report this year. More than 40 of these provisions added to or amended the Internal Revenue Code and represent the largest set of tax law changes the IRS has had to implement in more than 20 years.

More here:

The NRCC’s claim that the IRS will be ‘in charge of your health care’