The ObamaCare Regulatory Rush
HCS/430
Teela Carmack
September 22, 2014
Article or Case Law Research
What is ObamaCare? ObamaCare is another name for The Affordable Care Act (ACA); this is a federal law established in 2010 that establishes new consumer protections for individuals with their health insurance coverage, standards for care by doctors and hospitals and an expansion of health coverage. Most of the protections are in effect, care standards are being phased in over time, and the expansion of health coverage begins on January 1, 2014 ("Transamerica Center for Health Studies", 2014). Effective the January 2014, every American is required to have health insurance coverage; the coverage can be thought an employer, privately purchased for the individual, or through a governmental policy, anyone not covered will be forced to pay a penalty on their Federal income tax filling ("Transamerica Center for Health Studies", 2014).
ObamaCare When ObamaCare was established into law on March 23, 2010 and there have been many reports of issues with said program. Batkins and Brannon (2014), say when the administration began implementation if the PPACA, it issued a set of interim final rules that sailed through the Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis, these rules where rushed through at a breakneck pace, often with merely perfunctory analysis. Since then, the results of hastily reviewed regulations have been shown almost to the public almost on a daily basis, along with corrections, delays, and badly executed rollouts. These issues have come at a huge expense to tax payers. In a document written by Christopher Conover and Jerry Ellig entitled “The Poor Quality of Affordable Care Act Regulations” they express there were six ACA regulations that fared poorly on critical analytical metrics when it was compared to other health care as well as Homeland Security regulations; it was also suggested that these problems where based on the poor rooted analytical presidential priorities, which means that there was little OIRA could do to ensure proper analysis (Batkins & Brannon, 2014). The problem with this is that according to the article, the presidency was able to pressure the regulatory office to look the other way and thus pass regulations that should not have been passed. The sole purpose of the OIRA is “to protect public health, welfare, safety, and environment while promoting economic growth, innovation and competitiveness, and job creation. It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative… it must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of the regulatory system ("The White House ", 2014).”
Regulations The entire reason why the PPACA was established was to save money on health care costs, make sure every individual has health insurance coverage, and to establish standards for care; however this has not been the end result. Since the beginning of the rollouts, the PPACA’s has created more issues than solve them. The website has not worked, it has had broken regulations, it has increased premiums, and has even canceled insurance coverage plans (Batkins & Brannon, 2014). The rollout has resulted in several regulatory missteps, nearly one-third of all the regulations contain errors, so far there have been a total of 286 regulatory errors and because of this, there have been a total of 140 pages of