Global health-care initiatives continue expensive expansion

The federal government’s portfolio of international health-care initiatives has grown so enormous that the Obama administration is infusing another quarter-billion dollars simply to help operate this global bureaucracy.

The estimated return on this taxpayer-funded venture: 250 new support staff.

This discovery comes at a time when new information reveals that Obama’s growing health-care bureaucracy at home will eliminate the equivalent of 2.3 million private-sector jobs within a decade.

The U.S. Agency for International Development – based on its own estimate – now is poised to spend the equivalent of a million dollars on each temporary worker that it hires via the Global Health Support Initiative, or GHSI III.

“We anticipate approximately 250 contract staff will be needed to provide technical, professional, operational, and administrative support” to USAID/Bureau for Global Health, or USAID/GH, programs worldwide,” the agency said in a notice to contractors that WND discovered via routine database research.

This contractor alert is known as a “presolicitation” notice, meaning the agency is not yet formally soliciting bids for such services.

Despite acknowledging the million-per-staffer cost estimate, USAID declared that it is “not releasing any other information concerning this [contracting] requirement.”

In the absence of additional project data, WND reviewed the FedBizOpps database for potential information on predecessor initiatives such as GHSI II.

WND discovered the administration had launched that earlier project-segment Jan. 23, 2009 – just three days after Obama first took office.

The move preserved 90 positions the George W. Bush administration already created. USAID under Obama sought to “transition and maintain” those jobs for another three years.

Although a government bid-request known as a Request for Proposals is available through the FedBizOpps database, contract-cost data for GHSI I and II was absent.

The RFP reveals, however, that the hiring of contractor-supplied USAID workers not only preceded Obama but came before Bush as well.

Indeed, the William J. Clinton administration started that outsourcing trend in 2000, the document points out.

USAID/GH at the time had signed an inter-agency agreement with the U.S. Department of Treasury, which on behalf of the agency arranged “non-direct-hire staffing.” Bush in turn launched GHSI when the agreement ended in 2007.

Obama expanded that initiative among many other worldwide health programs.

The current $250 million contractor-support plan, for instance, is miniscule contrasted to Obama’s Global Health Supply Chain initiative, which could cost taxpayers $56 billion, WND discovered in 2012.

In yet another legacy left by the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama’s USAID is expanding an existing HIV program – cost unknown – whose explicit aim is to help homosexuals, prostitutes, and transgendered people of Central America.

Program documents point out that among the biggest impediments to U.S. policy success in that region are “conservative gender norms related to sexuality and strong normative preference for heterosexuality.”

Obama in recent months likewise launched an ambitious plan to expand health-care and social-services access to millions of Kenyans.

Taking its lead from the advertising industry, the administration last month separately awarded $60 million in combined contracts to expand its global dissemination of health-care information, a task it describes as “health communication programming.”

That endeavor is known as TRANSFORM: Translating Effective Practices from Research, Marketing and Design.

http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/obama-plan-temp-jobs-at-1-million-each/print/