Ever see a high pressure sales job on a used car lot? You know, where the salesman with the slicked back hair and the bad cologne tries to stick you with a lemon. His job is to get you off the lot at sticker price before you realize the car has no power steering or air conditioning.
Well that is exactly what we have seen from the very beginning with the president’s healthcare overhaul boondoggle known as Obamacare. (The Obama administration has already given businesses a one-year delay for implementation, conveniently shifting the mess past Election Day 2014, while businesses are moving to hire more part-time workersto avoid the penalties required by the law.)
As Judicial Watch uncovered, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has used every trick in the book to shove Obamacare down our throats. The agency bankrolled a $200 million propaganda campaign to “persuade” the American people that the healthcare monstrosity would be in their best interest; they even trotted out aging television star Andy Griffith for a “public service” campaign. HHS also spent $1.4 million to make “a big guerilla campaign splash” on the Internet through paid advertisements targeting Hispanics, blacks, and women.
And now we learn that HHS was ready--on moment-one after Obamacare passage--to bypass compensation rules to hire a legion of high-priced government employees to push the lemon off the lot.
According to documents we released this week, on the day Obamacare passed, HHS obtained permission from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to cast aside normal hiring procedures in order to hire 1,814 highly-paid, top-level administrators to expedite Obamacare implementation.
According to the documents obtained by Judicial Watch, OPM Director John Berry gave HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources Denise Wells extraordinary “direct-hire appointing authority” (DHA) in order to bypass normal channels and, in Berry’s words, “hire quickly in order to execute the President’s directive with respect to implementing health care reform.” In all, HHS was granted permission to utilize what Wells termed the DHA “valuable human capital recruitment tool” to hire 1,814 GS 13–15 employees, including:
- 59 Social Science Analyst/Specialists at the GS-15 level
- 350 Health Insurance Specialists at the GS-15 level
- 55 Administrative and Program Specialists at the GS-15 level
- 235 Program Analysts/Management Analysts at the GS-15 level
- 40 Accountants at the GS 15 level
- 90 Dental Officers at the GS 14 level
- 291 Public Health Advisors/Analysts at the GS-14 level
- 261 Consumer Safety Officers at the GS-13 level
- 92 Grants Management Specialists at the GS-15 level
- 50 Criminal Investigators at the GS-13 level
- 291 Information Technology Specialists at the GS-15 level
According to the Base General Schedule Pay Scale, in 2010, the nearly 2,000 new employees hired to “quickly” implement the Obamacare program would have received a salary between $70,000 and $130,000 per year. More than 1,100 of the new employees would have come in at the GS-15 level, starting at nearly $100,000 annually. The Daily Mail took a look at our documents that the Obama administration sought to spend $159 million a year on these new Obamacare government employees.
But there is more.
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