The number of regulations that could be created because of ObamaCare is virtually infinite. The words “The Secretary Shall Determine…” appear 1,563 times in the law, and many of those determinations give way to open-ended control of health insurance requirements. The government's latest set of rules cover these eight aspects of the law:
- Early Retiree Reinsurance Program
- Dependent Coverage for Children up to Age 26
- Grandfathered Health Plans
- Preexisting-condition Exclusions, Limits, and So Forth
- Coverage of Preventive Services
- Claims Appeal and External Review Processes
- Preexisting-condition Insurance Plan
- Medical Loss Ratio Requirements
Our friends at the Mercatus Center are out with a study that illustrates the haste and inaccuracy of the government’s analysis of these regulations.
In the study, Mercatus experts Jerry Ellig and Chris Conover reach some pretty disheartening findings. Not surprisingly, federal bureaucrats overestimated the benefits and underestimated the costs of the implementation of these new rules. They didn’t consider the common cost-benefit measures that health economists typically use, but instead omitted important information. (I’m shocked!)
Rather than objectively studying the effect that these rules could have on doctors, patients, and the health care system, the government used their “analysis” of the regulations as yet another opportunity to make the Affordable Care Act look more wonderful than it really is. It’s sad to think that our tax dollars are wasted on internal “analyses” of regulations that are more like propaganda than research.
Check out the Mercatus study, or if you don’t have time, see the summary here. Or listen to author Jerry Ellig on the Coffee and Markets podcast.