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- Jun 13, 2009
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Your not going to post the 16000 pages of regulation? Why not? Oh we have to pass it to see WHATS IN IT. It passed whats in it?
Regulations exist to put the concepts in legislation into practice. A piece of legislation will put forth a general idea but, Congressmen not being experts, they leave it to the executive branch which solicits public comment on rules it produces. So the simplest example of this is the requirement that insurance plans allow children of policyholders to stay on their plans if they choose to up to the age of 26. The part of the law establishing this is very short:
SEC. 2714. EXTENSION OF DEPENDENT COVERAGE.
`(a) In General- A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage that provides dependent coverage of children shall continue to make such coverage available for an adult child (who is not married) until the child turns 26 years of age. Nothing in this section shall require a health plan or a health insurance issuer described in the preceding sentence to make coverage available for a child of a child receiving dependent coverage.
`(b) Regulations- The Secretary shall promulgate regulations to define the dependents to which coverage shall be made available under subsection (a).
`(c) Rule of Construction- Nothing in this section shall be construed to modify the definition of `dependent' as used in the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 with respect to the tax treatment of the cost of coverage.
They throw out the idea and leave it to HHS to fill in the details to make it work. Which is why there's now an interim final rule (20 pages long!) clarifying how this works. But a page count isn't particularly descriptive since the actual rules aren't 20 pages long. Most of the space is taken up by background, estimates of the economic impact and paperwork burdens of the regulation, and even examples (in the form of hypothetical scenarios) that demonstrate how the rule works in practice. So just because a regulation is 20 pages long, that doesn't mean there are actually 20 pages of new rules in it that have to be followed.
But if you want to talk about specific regulations, that's fine with me.
SO THE DEATH PANELS DESCRIPTIONS WERE ACCURATE. It may not be a panel, just some lobbyist that greased the right palms.
An I told you so will apply here somewhere.