ENTER THE OBAMACARE POLICE

The Affordable Care Act certainly isn’t doing much to make health care more affordable, or more available, but one thing it does excel at is making government larger.  It might be more accurately known as the Full Bureaucrat Employment Act.

After chipping through the usual Obama Administration stonewalls with a Freedom of Information Act request, the UK Daily Mail obtained a spreadsheet from the Department of Health and Human Services, and discovered the Administration has been quietly building a squad of ObamaCare “detectives,” part of a vast and well-paid bureaucratic army:

On the day President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, HHS received authority from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to make as many as 1,814 new hires under an emergency ‘Direct Hiring Authority’ order.

The Obama administration ordered that employment expansion despite a government-wide hiring freeze.

A total of 1,684 of those positions were filled. An analysis by MailOnline shows that at 2010 federal government salary rates, the new employees’ salaries alone cost the U.S. at least $138.8 million every year.

Had the agency filled all its available jobs, that cost would have been a minimum of $159 million.

The hiring began in May 2010 and continued through June 2013, making the later hires eligible for higher salaries as a result of annual cost-of-living increases.

[...] The lowest salary on the list was for a single contracting officer at Grade 7, Step 1, an annual rate of about $42,350, including a so-called ‘differential’ payments. Those increases are given to all federal employees in order to adjust for regional cost-of-living differences.

The highest salary in 2010 dollars, including that differential payment, was about $161,450, earned by a total of 29 new employee. They include health insurance administrators, contracting officers and information technology managers.

Via: Human Events

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