The Obama administration has had to issue 254 corrections to its own Obamacare regulations.

To read this post please scroll down.

Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to

Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.

November 13, 2013 7:38 pm Robert Zimmerman

You think their website is bad? The Obama administration has had to issue 254 corrections to its own Obamacare regulations.

The damage wasn’t limited to little-used regulatory language that needed to be fixed of careless mistakes. The medical loss ratio requirement has been hotly debated as a tool to limit insurance companies’ profitability. Billed by The Washington Post as the “provision that terrifies insurers,” the policy forces insurance companies to spend a mandated percentage of patient premiums on patient care in order to keep premiums artificially low. Twenty-four corrections were issued to the Medical Loss Ratio rule alone. Some parts of the regulations were “technically inaccurate and [conflicted] with language elsewhere,” according to Batkins. Some corrections had to be corrected again later on.

The report pointed to the real-world effects of mistakes in the dense regulations, specifically federal officials’ assumption that it would take 28 minutes to complete an online application via the federal exchange, which turned out to be drastically wrong. [emphasis mine]

Remember, the word “regulation” is really about control and power. One entity, the government, gets to regulate the behavior of others. The problem is that this particular government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, is wholly incompetent.

2 comments

Orion314
November 13, 2013 at 8:42 pm
During my decades of listening to politician’s doublespeak, I have learned that if you reverse everything they say , you will get a far more acurate representation of what they actually mean. Case in point, Obama said “all Americans will have healthcare”
translation: “No Americans will have healthcare”
Edward
November 14, 2013 at 3:43 pm
“…the policy forces insurance companies to spend a mandated percentage of patient premiums on patient care in order to keep premiums artificially low.”

I can already see the unintended consequences (poor workmanship of the law). I assume that the mandated percentage is an attempt to make sure that no less than some percentage (e.g. 90%) is spent on patient care rather than administration costs. However, additional regulations require additional administrators in order to ensure that the regulations are met. Thus, if the regulations cost too much, then even *more* money will have to be spent on patient care to bring up that percentage.

A broken bone, for instance, may end up with the doctor or medical facility ordering several unnecessary tests just to make up for the massive regulatory costs. It looks like more was spent on patient care, keeping the doctor and facility in compliance, but far more was spent than necessary, driving up the overall costs and the premiums.

Does no one in government understand basic economics or human behavior?

“Obamacare’s public troubles are evidence of shoddy lawmaking, Batkins concluded.”

Why do I get the feeling that there will be none of the desperately needed quality control in our governance?

The Obama administration has had to issue 254 corrections to its own Obamacare regulations.

2 comments

Leave a Reply