Congress didn’t legislate the expansion. The Internal Revenue Service did.

The IRS scrapped an Obama administration regulation that faithfully implemented the Obamacare statute, officially called the Affordable Care Act, which became law in 2010 on a party-line vote.

At issue is whether dependents of a worker with an offer of employer-sponsored coverage can shun that coverage and claim premium tax subsidies for Obamacare policies instead.

The statute and the Obama administration regulation were clear on this point. Such dependents qualify for tax-subsidized policies only if the cost of self-only employer-sponsored coverage exceeds 9.5% of the worker’s household income. If not, neither the worker nor her dependents could receive Obamacare premium subsidies.

Many complained about this provision, which they called the “family glitch.” They said that dependents should be eligible for subsidies if premiums for employer-sponsored family coverage —rather than self-only coverage—were too costly. The Obama administration rejected this approach and followed the law as Congress wrote it.

In the intervening 12 years, lawmakers have introduced bills to base eligibility for subsidies on the cost of family coverage. Congress adopted none of them.

Biden’s IRS did what Congress had left undone. It effectively amended the tax code, creating eligibility for premium subsidies based on the cost of employer-sponsored family coverage.

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, the principal effect of this policy will not be to reduce the number of Americans who are uninsured. Although a family coverage affordability test would make 4.8 million dependents eligible for federal subsidies, the analysis found that the policy will reduce the number of uninsured by only 190,000. The vast majority of dependents who benefit from this change currently have health insurance.

The new rule likely will encourage some employers to reduce or eliminate their contributions to dependent coverage. Employers, on average, pay 72% of premiums for dependents. With companies struggling to cover rising health insurance costs, some may let taxpayers foot the bill for covering their employees’ family members.

The Treasury Department doesn’t think that will happen. Still, officials there estimate that this unlawful regulation will cost the federal government $38 billion over the next 10 years.

That’s a mere pittance compared with the Biden administration’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness fiat, but it comes on top of the net $4.8 trillion increase in federal debt resulting from legislation and regulations during the Biden administration’s first 21 months in office.

The Biden administration has accompanied this pattern of fiscal recklessness with breaches of its statutory and constitutional limits.

Sometimes, as with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine mandate and the transportation mask mandate imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the courts rein them in. Undeterred by these reminders of the limits on its power, the administration frequently has ignored the law (as with student loans) or, in this case, rewritten it.

More troubling still is the politicization of federal agencies. The Justice Department has taken actions that appear politically motivated against pro-life activists and parents who oppose the teaching of critical race theory in their children’s schools.

Now the IRS has reversed a longstanding regulation that the Obama administration promulgated and contravened a law widely regarded as President Barack Obama’s signal domestic policy achievement.

Once agencies charged with enforcing federal laws and collecting taxes begin to pursue political agendas, there is no turning back. The next administration can be expected to use the Justice Department and IRS—newly fortified with 87,000 additional employees—for its own political ends.

The Biden administration may not have thought through these implications. Administration officials instead exude the arrogance of people who, having gained power, behave as if they always will wield it.

Their contempt for hearing criticism of their new Obamacare regulation is a case in point. Once an agency has completed drafting a rule, officials send it to the Office of Management and Budget for final review. Members of the public may request a meeting with OMB to present comments.

I was part of a group that requested a meeting, along with colleagues from the Paragon Policy Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Galen Institute. Officials from OMB, the IRS, and the Treasury Department were to attend.

But when we logged onto the Zoom call, no one from the administration showed. OMB blamed a “Zoom failure” and offered several rescheduling options.

The meeting never happened.

OMB first delayed rescheduling the meeting, blaming Hurricane Ian. (Only two participants, Paragon’s Brian Blase and I, live in Florida, and the storm didn’t affect our participation.)

OMB then approved the regulation and canceled the meeting. And we were not the only critics of the rule who had our meeting abruptly canceled.

I don’t for a moment imagine these meetings would have changed any minds. Canceling it merely spared Biden administration officials the discomfort of hearing that the rule was unlawful and reflected the politicization of the IRS.

Power breeds arrogance, and this administration has plenty of both.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

The authors tell us that counties that voted for GOP presidential candidates between 2000 and 2016 had smaller reductions in age-adjusted mortality rates over the past two decades than counties that backed their Democratic rivals.

Before the Biden administration requires presidential ballots to bear a surgeon general’s warning (“Voting Republican kills!”), it’s worth giving the study a closer look.

Its first and most obvious flaw is that hundreds of counties switched party preferences over the course of those five presidential elections. Then-Vice President Al Gore may have carried a given county in 2000, followed by then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004, and then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, but if Trump prevailed in 2016, its age-adjusted mortality reduction for the 2001-2019 period would be assigned to the GOP column.

This is a significant defect. Democrats carried 673 counties in 2000, but just 490 in 2016. Trump carried 2,622 in 2016, according to the study. Thus, the study  classifies 183 counties that voted for Gore in 2000 as Republican in 2019 in measuring mortality changes over the 2001-2019 period.

The list of counties that backed one party or the other fluctuated over the five election cycles. Democrats won 673 counties in 2000 and 874 in 2008 before plunging to 490 in 2016. The list of counties the study compares is thus wildly inconsistent, rendering its findings suspect.

The authors also looked at a subset of counties that voted consistently for Republicans or Democrats in all five presidential contests. The results of that analysis were underwhelming.

Age-adjusted mortality in large metro counties fell by an identical 1.4% of residents between 2001 and 2019, whether those counties voted Democratic or Republican in all five elections. Small to midsize metro areas that backed Democrats in those five races had declines of 0.9% over that period, compared with 0.8% in comparable areas that voted Republican.

That difference isn’t statistically significant. The differences in rural counties are larger, but the confidence intervals (similar to the margin of error or +/- in public opinion polls) intersect, suggesting that the differences may be due to chance. The increased urbanization of the Democratic Party and the GOP’s growing appeal to rural America might well explain the differences in mortality rate changes.

Despite Democratic nominees carrying 183 fewer counties in 2016 than in 2000, Joe Biden won more large urban counties than Gore. He prevailed in 156 large urban counties with a combined total of nearly 134 million residents, compared with just 46 million in such counties that backed Trump, giving Biden almost a 3-1 advantage in that category.

More than three-fourths of residents in counties that backed Biden lived in large metro areas, compared with just 32% for Trump. Residents in rural counties that Trump won outnumbered those in rural Biden counties by nearly 8 to 1. Just 5.4 million lived in rural counties that backed Biden, making up just 3% of the residents in counties he carried.

In short, the differences the authors cite may well be explained by something we already know; namely, that Trump’s strength is in rural counties, where health status is poorer and life expectancies are shorter, while Biden’s power base is in urban centers, where medical care is generally state of the art.

Looking at the counties that voted consistently for the same party over all five presidential election cycles yields other anomalies. For example, average age-adjusted mortality for blacks declined by an identical 1.4% in both Democratic and Republican counties. Mortality among Hispanics fell by 1.6% in GOP counties, compared with just 1.3% in Democratic counties, although the confidence intervals overlap.

The only statistically significant difference is in mortality rate reductions among whites, which dropped by 1.0% over the period in Democratic counties, compared with 0.6% in Republican counties.

Do the authors believe that voting patterns produce reverse health inequities? Design flaws and anomalies aside, the study is—at best—silly. It deploys dodgy statistical legerdemain to make a political point.

Absurdities abound. Are people who vote for a Democrat more likely to die because a Republican carried his or her county? Is it safe to vote Republican so long as you live in a county that reliably backs Democrats?

To their credit, the authors acknowledge that they could not “explain the link between political environment and mortality, and the direction of this association.” Or whether there is any such link at all. The British Medical Journal has published many studies that have advanced human knowledge and contributed to better medical care.

This isn’t one of them.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.