Ignoring The Rules

 

Stanley Feld M.D., FACP,MACE

 President Obama and his healthcare agencies do not follow the rules required for agencies to write new regulations.

If President Obama does not follow the rules and regulations how can he expect agencies in the government as well as private businesses to follow the rules and regulations?

The President is supposed to set an example for others.

The Congress has relinquished its watchdog power over the executive branch of government. Even the head of CMS, the agency writing the regulations, was an appointee not approved by congress.

Government is supposed to be elected by the people for the people. President Obama has side stepped this obligation. He feels he knows what the people need.

“In a series of papers for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Christopher Conover and Jerry Ellig provide evidence to suggest that “the involvement of both White House and high-ranking agency staff” suggests that “the administration likely got the [ObamaCare] rules it wanted written.”

This series of papers were published in January 2012. I missed them. The traditional media ignored their findings. The Mercatus Center’s papers were not picked up by the alternative media either.   

I have noted, in the past, that President Obama and his staff have consistently “cooked the books” on budget estimates of the costs of his Healthcare Reform Plan.

 His numbers did not add up. His assumptions are usually incorrect. The data presented to the CBO has been inaccurate.

 

 

 

 

 

In summary, these Mercatus Center papers demonstrate how President Obama overrode the normal checks and balances used to ensure that federal regulations impose the smallest possible burden on the private sector.

He bypassed the required regulations used in evaluating the regulatory impact for interim rules.

"Rather than posting required regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) with interim rules and allowing time for analysis and comment, the White House and its agency heads dictated the rules that would be written, curbed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review function, and then simply declared that the interim rules were final."

Dr. Jerry Ellig is the study's co-author.  He said;

 "In this study, we looked at the federal government’s analysis for the 8 major “interim final” regulations issued in 2010 to implement key components of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)."

"The intent of regulatory analysis is to inform decisions by identifying the problem the regulation is supposed to solve, and assessing the pros and cons of alternative solutions. But we found these key ACA analyses to be rushed, seriously incomplete, and rarely used to inform decisions.'

 In 2008, the average regulation received 56 days of OMB review. In 2009, the average regulation received 27 days of review. 

 In 2010, the average ObamaCare regulation received 5 days of review.

The review was brief because it was not done according to the rules and regulations.

President Obama cannot possibly understand the economic impact of the resulting regulations. Their economic impact is poorly defined and therefore not understood.

The authors suggested that Congress should consider establishing an independent review agency that would do a regulatory impact analysis of the proposed regulation using widely accepted standards before the regulations are final. 

“The RIAs accompanying the regulations were “seriously incomplete, and they fell far short of federal agencies’ normal practice.”

The Mercatus Center’s Regulatory Report Card criteria, the best analysis of the 8 regulations studied received just 25 out of 60 possible points—the equivalent of an ‘F’.

“President Obama’s regulatory impact analyses also regularly under-estimated costs, over-estimated benefits, and ignored alternatives that would have had lower costs or greater benefits.”  

The defects in the regulations are too numerous to list and too aggravating to contemplate.

Health care economists have estimated that these defects will result in between a 10 and 41 percent cost overrun in health care spending

My major point is not the defects in the final interim regulations.

My point is the regulatory process using rules of the regulatory impact analysis have been ignored.

The rules of the process have been ignored in order to reflect President Obama’s ideology.

The issue is a process issue.  President Obama’s administration circumvented processes that were constructed to protect the American people from government abuse.

He has disrespected the will of the people and the checks and balance system, has marginalized congress, tried to intimidate the judiciary system and ignored the constitution.

How can President Obama expect the American people to respect or trust him? Americans are smart but only if their sources of information are not bias or controlled.

The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone

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