The Obamacare regulatory nightmare

By Tom Quiner

imagesGovernment regulations take time to enforce.

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) adds 127 million of hours of new regulation time to federal bureaucrats every year. Federal law requires agencies to assess how much new paperwork will be created by new laws and regulations. Here are the estimates made by government agencies themselves.

The Hospice Quality Reporting Program says it’s going to add 657,392 hours of new regulation time.

The Medication Therapy Management Program Improvements–Standardized Format says it’ll add 1,179,894 hours of new regulation time.

Web Based HIV Behavioral Survey among men who have sex with men: 44,819 hours of new regulation time.

HHS/CMS Skilled Nursing Facility and Skilled Nursing Facility Cost Report and Supporting Regulations in 42 CFR 413.20, 413.24, and 413.106:  464,942 hours of new regulation time.

You can read a complete list at the Obama Burden Tracker, but I think you get the idea. In all, the bureaucracy will have to expand to handle the 3,359,530 hours needed to set up the system and an additional 127,602,371 hours a year to administer it.

The average federal employee earns about $83,000 a year (according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis), or let’s call it about $41.50 per hour, assuming they work a forty hour week 50 weeks out of the year. That’s going to cost taxpayers about an extra $5.3 billion a year in new government regulations. In the scheme of things where we’re running annual deficits of a trillion dollars, I suppose $5.3 billion is chump change. But this doesn’t factor in new hiring that that will be necessary as Obamacare ramps up. Nor does it factor in the compliance cost to the private sector.

Obamacare increase complexity and cost of our healthcare system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 Comments

  1. publiusred on February 27, 2013 at 8:51 am

    Excellent. People just finding out what the bill involves may now begin to understand why Pelosi and crew were striving to hide the inner workings by saying, “We have to pass it, to know what is in it.”



    • quinersdiner on February 27, 2013 at 10:15 am

      If people knew what was really in the bill, it would have been career-enders for anyone who voted for it. Now it appears we’re stuck with it for life.