I bet you thought that the so-called “Death Panels” were the scariest things in the Democrats’ proposed healthcare plans. Nay, not so, my friend. You are oh so wrong.

Byron York has a piece in the Washington Examiner that rivals any Stephen King novel for sending chills down your back:

But if the plan envisioned by President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats is enacted, the primary federal bureaucracy responsible for implementing and enforcing national health care will be an old and familiar one: the Internal Revenue Service. Under the Democrats’ health care proposals, the already powerful — and already feared — IRS would wield even more power and extend its reach even farther into the lives of ordinary Americans, and the presidentially-appointed head of the new health care bureaucracy would have access to confidential IRS information about millions of individual taxpayers.
In short, health care reform, as currently envisioned by Democratic leaders, would be built on the foundation of an expanded and more intrusive IRS.
Under the various proposals now on the table, the IRS would become the main agency for determining who has an “acceptable” health insurance plan; for finding and punishing those who don’t have such a plan; for subsidizing individual health insurance costs through the issuance of a tax credits; and for enforcing the rules on those who attempt to opt out, abuse, or game the system. A substantial portion of H.R. 3200, the House health care bill, is devoted to amending the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 in order to give the IRS the authority to perform these new duties.

If you haven’t assumed the fetal position yet, read the whole story here.

Just a thought… How would this affect Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner? Or Charlie Rangle? Oh, right, never mind. They’d be exempt from the whole program. I forgot. Silly me.