Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Health “Reform” = New Bureaucrats Galore!

The Associated Press has a story about the implications of the new health care law on the President’s budget – specifically the number of new employees and additional funding requested by the Administration for the law’s implementation.  The story notes that the budget “has no line item for health care implementation,” and that “it may not be easy to see” all the details about where the money is being spent.  (Given the billions of dollars being spent, Deep Throat would have a field day following all this taxpayer money.)  But here’s what we do know about just some of the money being requested and spent:

  • The Internal Revenue Service requested a whopping 1,270 new bureaucrat positions to implement the law – a down payment on what could be up to 16,500 agents hired by the IRS to enforce the individual mandate and other related provisions.
  • The public affairs office at the Department of Health and Human Services requested a 315% increase in its budget; that office is “tasked with selling the health care reform law.”
  • HHS has also established a sprawling new federal bureaucracy to regulate the private insurance purchased by every American; the New York Times previously reported that this new bureaucracy leased a 70,000 square foot office in Bethesda at nearly double the going market rate – wasting millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.
  • The HHS Budget in Brief contemplates the Department adding nearly 4,700 new positions.  What’s more, EVERY HHS division will see an increase in the number of federal bureaucrats employed under the President’s proposal.
  • Medicare Administrator Berwick admitted that “all of the agencies have features of the [law] that impact their budgets,” – a tacit admission both that money is fungible, and that increases in funding will almost by definition be used to support implementation of Democrats’ unpopular 2700-page health care law.

These developments come only a few months after a Congressional Research Service report described the number of new bureaucracies created by the law as “unknowable.”  The Administration’s refusal to quantify the number of bureaucrats and resources necessary to implement the law follows in the same vein.

The lack of clear disclosure about the budgetary details of implementation is far from consistent with the President’s promise of “an unmatched level of transparency, participation, and accountability across the entire Administration.”  However, the Administration’s claims that it can’t (as opposed to won’t) disclose more information because that information can’t be quantified raises a more interesting question:  How can the federal government implement the law effectively if it doesn’t even know how many people are working on implementation?  And if it’s unknowable how many new bureaucrats will be employed and new bureaucracies created, doesn’t it also follow that it’s unknowable whether all this government, bureaucracy, and federal spending will actually work?