Why Yes, Health Care Reform Will Create Government Jobs!

The Republicans are in an awful tiff about it, too, raising the specter of thousands of armed Internal Revenue Service agents stalking the land to enforce the individual mandate to purchase insurance. I realize I'm being a little flip here. And I do agree that it will be good to know, as soon as is reasonably possible, how much federal agencies are going to have to expand in order to implement the bill. But in contrast to the GOP, I would like to know these numbers not because I am terrified by the prospect of several thousand, or even several tens of thousands more folks joining the federal workforce (in an existing force of 2 million, that's not a lot, dudes), but because the number gives us a sense of how hard health care reform is going to be to enforce. A number gives us a sense of how many folks we have to get through the hiring process, how many managers we have to find, how many people we have to get through confirmation processes. The Republicans opposed the bill on the grounds that it was going to grow government. Staffing up is a given part of that. All the pearl-clutching over the numbers now is just a way of prolonging the debate that led up to the bill's passage. It's not based in substantive concerns.