Meaningful Use from Meaningless Congress

I have wondered at times what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.

Ronald Reagan

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/46985.html

I will defer my missive on sleep-deprived doctors to comment on the Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare. The issue has recently been discovered by the mainstream press, and will be headlines in the news. I have commented on this extensively(Oct. 15, Nov 3). For my new readers I will summarize what I previously predicted the new Boehner controlled house would do.

1)The house will repeal Obamacare, loudly and with much fanfare, some Democrats will vote for repeal, with tacit support from their leaders, in order to keep their seats in the next election

2) The Senate will closely defeat repeal, along party lines, but even if enough Democrats defect to enable repeal, no veto-proof majority will exist. The entire process is simply a public relations stunt by the Republicans trying to gain voters.

3) House hearings, designed to embarrass the writers and supporters of Obamacare will succeed in pointing out the ridiculous assumptions, scandalous sell-outs, and political shortcuts taken in order to get the bill passed. Little will come of these hearings legislatively.

4) The Republicans can and will dramatically cut funding for the bureaucracy needed to implement Obamacare, and this will have far reaching and dramatic impact upon healthcare in America. The issue will be extremely contentious in Congress, and will possibly lead to another government shutdown.

The importance of point #4 cannot be overestimated. Obamacare represents more of a vision than a program. The two thousand pages remind me of the Hebrew bible, which needed several thousand more pages of explanation to apply to real life. To make the overly general, poorly conceived, and politically motivated concepts of Obamacare work, a huge government bureaucracy of lawyers, hospital administrators, nurses, staffers and even a few doctors will be needed. These people will have to be hired, housed, directed and paid. These necessities will cost money, that must come from Congress.

An example is the Electronic Medical Record legislation which was a part of the financial stimulus bill. A year after passage, the rules are just now being clarified. I have been attempting to navigate these regulations, and they are of a complexity similar to the tax code. Conforming to the rules(meaningful use) requires diligence, lots of coffee, programming skill, familiarity with government doublespeak, several lawyers, and a lot of money. After all of this is done, some low level bureaucrat, answerable to no-one, still has to make a decision as to whether you comply or not.

Without building a large infrastructure, almost none of the programs that make up Obamacare can be implemented. The friendly, knowledgeable, efficient and honest regulators which are so characteristic of government bureaucracies must be utilized to improve our healthcare system. No wonder a few people are skeptical.

Amazingly, this is just the beginning of the regulatory purgatory that is Obamacare. Without the equivalent of a new IRS, Division of Motor vehicles, or Transportation Security Administration, it simply won't work. Makes me want to retire again.