Obamacare Implementation Already Up To 13,000 New Pages Of Regulations
Nothing says “let’s make health care cheaper and more accessible” like thousands upon thousands of pages of new regulations, not to mention hundreds of new boards, panels and bureaus full of bureaucrats to make your health care experience more like your DMV experience.
With the Supreme Court giving President Obama’s new health care law a green light, federal and state officials are turning to implementation of the law — a lengthy and massive undertaking still in its early stages, but already costing money and expanding the government.
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.”
The individual mandate always got the most attention in the Obamacare law, and as odious as that bit of policy is, to me the far worse part of Obamacare is the vast authority over health insurance and health care the law conveys upon federal bureaucracy. Under Obamacare, the only health insurance you’ll be able to buy will be insurance that is approved by the federal government, and it doesn’t matter whether the health care exchange you’re required to buy it through is managed by your state or the feds.
Decisions about what kind of care will be covered, and how much of that care will be covered and when that care will be covered will be made by bureaucrats.
And, again, this is supposed to make your health care experience better.
Tags: Health Care, health insurance, obamacare
