Remember when Nancy Pelosi told us that we had to pass the president’s signature health care bill to find out what was in it?
The jollies over at the Economist have done so, and have found some interesting tid-bits (emphasis added):
Dodd-Frank is part of a wider trend. Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded. Republicans write rules to thwart terrorists, which make flying in America an ordeal and prompt legions of brainy migrants to move to Canada instead. Democrats write rules to expand the welfare state. Barack Obama’s health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system’s staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis.
Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.
P.J. O’Rourke once plaintively asked when we’d have enough laws, at what point we could turn Congress off, and get the gentlemen and ladies back to the farm in time for the harvest season.
I think we’re past that time, but the machine still spins.
I guess that means that if you are injured due to your water skis catching fire while you are carrying a parrot, there are 27 different permutations of code combinations which the MD must weed through to get reimbursed.
Back to the farm? How about a better question, which ones could you see fixing their lawn mower on a Saturday morning before doing a bit of yard work? Certainly not Pelosi or even McConnell.
And from this bit of example, our CinC is a bit lacking in manual skills. Probably best he’s emphasized his verbal skills in life.
Every single word written in US Code costs me taxes. If we are to pare back the spending, we must reduce the laws. If you aren’t willing to see someone have a gun shoved in their face and carted off to prison over refusal to comply with “policy x”, then perhapse you ought not impose that law on others.
For a while now I’ve thought that every federal law and regulation should expire at midnight, Oct. 1 unless specifically reauthorized by a new law in the previous year. Eventually we’d reach equilibrium where the law simply couldn’t get any more complex because the legislators would be spending 100% of their time reauthorizing the existing system.
If you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull…
+1
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
That, and once you establish enough laws that no one can know them all, everyone becomes a lawbreaker and your ability to live in peace is a function not of obedience to the law but the will of law enforcement and the judiciary – and on how much influence you have with them on the basis of familial, political or financial ties.
My favorite quote from P.J. O’Rourke applies here:
Another good one (and on-topic, too!):
I just hope that when I get injured by flaming water skies, they use the right code…I’d hate to think of having to go without treatment for such an injury because they used the wrong code…
This is why I believe in cutting Congressional pay by 1% for every day beyond 120 that Congress is in session each year.
About a year ago I took a class on accounting fraud including health care manipulation. We stumbled upon these new codes. My favorite was one for injury to the lips while playing the trumpet in the course of employment.
Stop. It. Just. Stop. It.
Wait! What about the trombonists! The Tubists! The Clarinetists! (close to home here, please buy me some reeds) the Flautists!
The Saxophonists, we give ‘em 20 seconds head start, and then we unleash the dawgs upon them. I have always hated Saxophonists, since I first learned to play a musical instrument. Billy Jeff Clinton is a Saxophonist, and behaves like one.
P. J. also said something about taking something out behind the barn and killing it with an axe.
I believe that was in “Parliament of Whores”, one of my favorite books. I think it was in the chapter on dairy subsidies, with the passage about how artificial insemination is actually done to cows, and how similar that is to what the .gov is doing to the rest of us. And no, the cow doesn’t get kissed, either.
[...] post is about insane regulations. (And a big hat tip to whomever sent me the link, as I cannot find the person’s email right [...]