-By Warner Todd Huston
During the May 22 broadcast of National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation,” host Neil Conan repeatedly contradicted a guest by claiming that the IRS has nothing at all to do with Obamacare. NPR’s Conan is, of course, completely incorrect. The IRS is up to it’s Tea Party harassing neck in Obamacare.
The guest Conan contradicted was Kellyanne Conway, a Republican strategist and pollster. Conway was on to discuss the various scandals in which Obama is mired and close to the end of her segment she questioned how the American people can trust the IRS to implement Obamacare.
Conan initially pressed her on the claim saying that she must have “misspoken.”
“And I think you may have misspoken earlier, Kellyanne Conway, about the IRS and its role in health care,” the host claimed. “It is responsible for collecting the fine if somebody does not get healthcare, it’s not responsible whether somebody gets healthcare or not.”
Conway went on properly to note that the IRS does, indeed, have a large hand on the tiller of Obamacare.
The Republican pollster noted that the American people are quite in the dark about how far reaching this Obamacare law is. They are in the dark about how it is supposed to work, she said. “When [the American people] think of implementing Obamacare… they aren’t thinking of the IRS,” she said.
Conway also reminded host Conan why Obamacare was upheld by the Supreme Court last year. It wasn’t upheld under the Commerce Clause, it was upheld under the federal government’s taxing powers.
“So, the same IRS that is playing politics with people’s lives and their applications will also have some kind of authority over what happens with healthcare,” she said.
As they came upon a break, Conan’s reply was a succinct–and wholly wrong–“No it won’t.”
Of course, the truth is that the IRS does have a large role in implementing Obamacare. Conan’s guest, Kellyanne Conway, even cited the Washington Post report that noted that the IRS has already created a large bureaucratic flowchart to implement Obamacare.
Even citing the left-leaning Post, though, wasn’t enough to convince the ill-informed NPR host.
But he is wrong. The IRS does have a large role in Obamacare. As the Heritage Foundation reports, “The GAO wrote that the IRS ‘has responsibilities in the implementation of 47’ provisions, while the Treasury inspector general concluded that ‘at least 42 provisions [of Obamacare] add to or amend the Internal Revenue Code.'”
That is hardly the “no it won’t” that NPR host Neil Conan insisted upon, is it?
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.