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

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.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

2 comments

  • Orion314

    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

    “…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?

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