Back in 1994, when I supported a single payer health plan, the Clintons infuriated me by creating a reform plan so Byzantine in its chains of power and newly minted bureaucracies, that it became incomprehensible. As a result, health reform failed. And it was so unnecessary, given that the much simpler Medicare structure was already in place.
Fast forward to the present. I now oppose single payer because I think it leads to rationing and breaks the bank. And once again, our elected leaders have used the cause of needed health care reform as an excuse to engage in stultifying bureaucracy building—instead of fixing the parts of our health care system that are broken without destroying the parts that work. Alas, this time, it didn’t fail. Indeed, Obamacare has created so many new bureaucracies that even the Congressional Research Service can’t count them all. From the story:
Don’t bother trying to count up the number of agencies, boards and commissions created under the new health care law. Estimating the number is “impossible,” a recent Congressional Research Service report says, and a true count “unknowable.” The reasons for the uncertainty are many, according to CRS’s Curtis W. Copeland, the author of the report “New Entities Created Pursuant to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The provisions of the law that create the new entities vary dramatically in specificity. The law says a lot about some of them and a little about many, and merely mentions a few. Some have been authorized without any instructions on who is to appoint whom, when that might happen and who will pay. Those agencies created without specific appointment or appropriations procedures will have to wait indefinitely for staff and funding before they can function, according to Copeland’s report. And others could be just the opposite: One entity might not be enough and could spawn others, resulting in an “indeterminate number of new organizations.”
Obamacare will tie this country’s health care system up in Gordian knots. Or, perhaps more vividly stated, wrap us like a fly in a spider’s web. Doctors, hospitals, and health insurers can’t be effective when they have to answer to so many overlords. What a disaster. Repeal. Revise. Reform. Defund.
