House Republicans demanded more documents Monday in an investigation they hope will derail a key feature of President Obama’s healthcare law.
Reps. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said the IRS redacted documents about how it decided to handle the law’s insurance subsidies. The lawmakers are now asking for an unfiltered look at the decision-making process.
The healthcare law provides subsidies for most people who buy insurance through a new insurance exchange. The law envisioned each state operating its own exchange, but authorized a federally-run fallback in states that don’t act.
The statute refers to subsidies flowing through a “state exchange” — which, to the law’s critics, means subsidies shouldn’t be available in the federal exchange. The IRS has said it determined that Congress intended for subsidies to be available in both state- and federally-run marketplaces, but Republicans have pressed the tax agency to back up that assertion.
Camp and Issa — respectively, the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said their staffers were allowed to view certain documents about the IRS’s decision-making, but only with heavy redaction.
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