Internal Revenue Service

The IRS has recently released rules to address aggressive debt collection from poor patients by nonprofit hospitals, ProPublica reports. The rules, required by the Affordable Care Act, will require nonprofit hospitals to "post their financial assistance policies on their websites and offer a written, 'plain language summary' of them to patients when they're in the hospital. If patients don't apply for assistance or pay their bills, then the hospitals are required to send at least one more summary of the policy, along with mentioning it on billing statements. And if hospitals plan to sue patients over unpaid bills, they must attempt to verbally tell the patients about their policies, as well as send notices that they are planning to sue and that the patients may qualify for financial assistance."

The Washington Post's Josh Hicks reports that "an independent review released last month faulted the IRS for scant oversight of charities, saying the agency examined the groups less frequently while its budget and workforce steadily shrank in recent years." The Government Accountability Office found that the IRS audited 0.7 percent of charities in 2013, down from 0.81 percent in 2011. The GAO also said the the IRS has not developed a system to measure the outcome of its scant oversight.

A major blow has been delivered today to Obamacare, Reuters reports: "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit accepted one of the main legal challenges to the policy by conservatives opposed to an expansion of the federal government" and threw out the federal tax regulation that implements Obamacare subsidies available to people with annual incomes of up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

President Obama's administration is still reeling from the failure to have the federal health-insurance exchange up and running for consumers to shop for health insurance (ahead of the deadline for when the insurance mandate kicks in). There could be further repurcussions if the Internal Revenue Service is not ready to enforce the requirement that all Americans secure health insurance, The Washington Post reports.

The issues include, The Post reports, that: "Besides lacking coverage information that would help the agency enforce the 'individual mandate,' the IRS also is hamstrung in penalizing those who do not sign up. The lawmakers who drafted the health-care law intentionally barred the IRS from using its customary tools for collecting penalties — liens, foreclosures and criminal prosecution. The only means of collecting the fine is to essentially garnish tax refunds for people who overpaid their taxes."