Originally published October 18 2013
Bureaucrats create nearly 12 million words of regulations to enforce Obamacare
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) If you thought the size of the original Obamacare legislation was excessive at nearly 2,700 pages, you ain't seen nothing yet. When all of the law's new regulations and rules are written and finalized, it will take a national forest's worth of trees to make all the paper on which to print them.
According to an analysis of the rules so far, CNSNews.com reports:
Bureaucracies in the Obama Administration have thus far published approximately 11,588,500 words of final Obamacare regulations, while there are only 381,517 words in the Obamacare law itself. That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law.
And they're essentially just getting started. It could be years before all of the initial rules are written - and that doesn't include all of the subsequent regulations this massive new bureaucracy will churn out in coming years.
Expect more of this bureaucracy in the future
As CNSNews.com reports, the general Obamacare law is actually a combination of two pieces of legislation - the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act. These bills were signed into law by President Obama in March 2010; since then, "various agencies in the administration have published 109 final regulations spelling out how they are to be implemented," the website reported.
In sum, these final 109 regulations account for a combined 10,535 pages in the Federal Register, where they must be officially published by law. And yet, expecting the average citizen (or any lawmaker) to read (and then understand) these excessive, complex rules is laughable - or it would be, if they didn't so seriously impact our lives.
As noted by CNSNews.com:
The Federal Register presents the regulations in relatively small type with three columns of text on each page. CNSNews.com calculated that there is an average of 1,100 words on each of these pages by counting the actual words in one 78-page Obamacare regulation and then dividing by 78.
At an average of 1,100 words per page, the 10,535 pages of Obamacare regulations consist of approximately 11,588,500 words.
By contrast, as officially published by the Government Printing Office, PPACA is 906 pages long and HCERA is 55 pages long. These pages include an average of only 397 words. That means PPACA and HCERA's combined 961 pages consist of approximately 381,517 words.
In the end, for every word that is actually contained in the Obamacare law, the Executive Branch's bureaucracies have written 30 more in regulations detailing how the law is to be enforced.
With regulations come - costs
In an analysis of the regulations thus far, Frontpage Magazine wrote that, in order to read the more than 11 million words of regulations thus far, you'd have to sit down and read 24 hours a day for a month, without pause.
"I imagine this is exactly what the Founders had in mind," the magazine's Daniel Greenfield wrote, sarcastically. "If there were a new liberal Constitution written today, it would have ten million pages and be completely indecipherable to the layman and would contradict itself on every other pages and assign all final powers to unelected bureaucrats."
The thing to keep in mind is that all of this ridiculously complex regulation will not only have consequences in terms of how healthcare will be delivered and "managed," but they carry huge compliance costs as well - costs that will, like all mandated regulatory costs, necessarily be transferred to patients or taxpayers - or more likely both.
On the third anniversary of the law's passage, Andrew Stiles of National Review tallied some figures: Citing a study by the American Action Forum, Obamacare had already amassed "$31.3 billion in regulatory costs and liabilities, as well as 71.5 million hours of paperwork."
Remember when Obama said his signature health reform law was going to reduce healthcare expenditures?
Sources:
http://www.cnsnews.com
http://frontpagemag.com
http://www.nationalreview.com
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