And they're not even done yet.

Fox News:

The Health and Human Services Department "was given a billion dollars implementation money," Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana said. "That money is gone already on additional bureaucrats and IT programs, computerization for the implementation."

"Oh boy," Stan Dorn of the Urban Institute said. "HHS has a huge amount of work to do and the states do, too. There will be new health insurance marketplaces in every state in the country, places you can go online, compare health plans."

The IRS, Health and Human Services and many other agencies will now write thousands of pages of regulations -- an effort well under way:  

"There's already 13,000 pages of regulations, and they're not even done yet," Rehberg said.

"It's a delegation of extensive authority from Congress to the Department of Health and Human Services and a lot of boards and commissions and bureaus throughout the bureaucracy," Matt Spalding of the Heritage Foundation said. "We counted about 180 or so."

There has been much focus on the mandate that all Americans obtain health insurance, but analysts say that's just a small part of the law -- covering only a few pages out of the law's 2700.

"The fact of the matter is the mandate is about two percent of the whole piece of the legislation," Spalding said. "It's a minor part."

Much bigger than the mandate itself are the insurance exchanges that will administer $681 billion in subsidies over 10 years, which will require a lot of new federal workers at the IRS and health department.

The darn thing is like an octopus - spreading its tentacles throughout government, latching on to various departments while the rest of us are unable to dislodge it. Those 13,000 pages of regulations all have the force of law and are guaranteed to confuse, befuddle, and annoy us beyond imagining.

The Kracken has been released and getting him back into his prison is going to take some doing.