And they’re just getting started…
The Health and Human Services Department “was given a billion dollars implementation money,” Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana said. “That money is gone already on additional bureaucrats and IT programs, computerization for the implementation.”
“Oh boy,” Stan Dorn of the Urban Institute said. “HHS has a huge amount of work to do and the states do, too. There will be new health insurance marketplaces in every state in the country, places you can go online, compare health plans.”
The IRS, Health and Human Services and many other agencies will now write thousands of pages of regulations — an effort well under way:
“There’s already 13,000 pages of regulations, and they’re not even done yet,” Rehberg said.
“It’s a delegation of extensive authority from Congress to the Department of Health and Human Services and a lot of boards and commissions and bureaus throughout the bureaucracy,” Matt Spalding of the Heritage Foundation said. “We counted about 180 or so.”
There has been much focus on the mandate that all Americans obtain health insurance, but analysts say that’s just a small part of the law — covering only a few pages out of the law’s 2700.
“The fact of the matter is the mandate is about two percent of the whole piece of the legislation,” Spalding said. “It’s a minor part.”
Much bigger than the mandate itself are the insurance exchanges that will administer $681 billion in subsidies over 10 years, which will require a lot of new federal workers at the IRS and health department.
When fully implemented Obamacare will create 180 new boards, bureaus or commissions, add thousands of new employees to government payrolls, and billions of dollars to federal budget. It is a massive expansion of federal power.
Nancy Pelosi famously said we had to pass it to know what’s in it, well we still don’t have a clear picture of what’s in it or what effect all these new rules and regulations being drafted by unelected, largely unaccountable bureaucrats will have on our liberty or ecomony.
Suffices to say this thing is legislative Pandora’s box, that will undoubtedly lead to all sorts of liberty-infringing, social-engineering surprises.
If nothing else Obamacare will prove Thomas Paine right — “Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
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