Yes, the tea party rules the GOP. The
conviction among teabaggers that the IRS is going to be in charge of your health care and will have its grubby fingers in your medical records isn't just the fever dreams of crazed extremists. It's the official lineof the establishment GOP, being used in an NRCC campaign against a handful of vulnerable Democrats, and it's totally bogus. The
Washington Post's fact-checker, Glenn Kessler,
says so, too.
Clearly, Republicans would like to raise doubts about the health-care law by associating it with the stench of the IRS scandal. But it’s a bit much to suggest that the IRS would now be running health care in the United States, especially since the law leaves the employer-based system largely intact. After all, as Republicans frequently note, the Department of Health and Human Services has been charged with writing the thousands of pages of regulations that will govern benefit packages, the running of health-care exchanges and the like.
The IRS, by contrast, is mostly the bill collector. It will validate whether people have insurance, but as we noted last week, it will have no access to private health-care data. As McClatchy News put it [...] “The Internal Revenue Service is an important cog in the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.” A “cog” does not mean it is in charge of people’s health care.
It's hardly like a fact check is going to keep Republicans from using this howler through the 2014 election. When has being called out for lying ever stopped them? But it's a pretty telling that the NRCC has officially decided to push this paranoid conspiracy theory.