Prior to Obamacare’s passage, there were about 18 million people uninsured.

Today, the estimate of people uninsured is, well, 18 million.

We’ve seen early on from the “revised downward” news reports (usually released on Fridays) after the launch of the Obamacare website that, um, no one is signing up. Yet everyone’s health costs are rising. Sometimes drastically.

The rise in healthcare costs and the lack of additional insured combine to show the inherent waste in the program. This reveals its true cost: your rising healthcare costs are not covering any newly insured people but are going to pay for administrators, website coders, clip-board scanning middlemen, and pencil pushers.* Obamacare, like so many things government has given us, is little more than another jobs program, meant to hire friends and relatives of politicians.

There isn’t much room for advancement in government, at any level. You could spend your whole life as some basement functionary, working for a little bit of pay. You could!

Or you expand your power by overseeing people. In government, the more people you oversee, the more money and power you get. Therefore, in nearly every government role, your first priority is to hire people. The more people you hire, the faster you advance.

This can be a great career move if you have very few employable skills or lack experience or education that might be useful in the private sector. A high school graduate can make more money than a VP of operations in a medium-sized company, if he or she gets into government and suddenly winds up hiring department heads. And those department heads? They hire more folks under them, and like Amway, the more legs you have under you, the faster you earn income.

This is why government never grows smaller, and why we have 18 identical job training programs that never get coalesced into one. Because each person in government is looking to hire more folks, no matter how convoluted the logic is. Each year, the personnel request increases in every department because every department is miraculously doing something more than it did last year. While Republicans criticize the IRS’s “scope creep,” we have to remember that scope creep is something bureaucrats want desperately. Why does the Department of Education have to have platoons of armed troops? Because someone needs to be in charge of them, not because the Department is doing something it should’t be doing. Inefficiency and waste is rewarding: if your staff slows down to where it’s backlogged, you simply request more help next year to catch up. And then, you slow down again.

Conservatives like to say that if they were in charge, they would reduce the size of government by eliminating the public sector unions. Trust the Czar, here: even if you did, little would change. Heck, public sector unions have only been around for a couple decades, yet government has grown steadily since Hoover was president. And that’s only because of Coolidge—the only president to reduce the size of the government in a measurable way.

Until you can find an easy, high-paying job in the private sector for every government employee, you’ll never reduce government’s size. Because we have created a system where the only thing better than managing 5 people is managing 50.

*In today’s age, of course, they’re staring at Excel spreadsheets. But pushing a mouse is just as time-consuming as pushing a pencil.