I constantly waste nearly half my time and my staff’s time coping with the suffocating bureaucratic red tape already imposed on our healthcare system by government and insurance companies. But Congress’ cost estimate of the current "reform" only includes the direct impact on government expenses, while totally ignoring the tremendous healthcare industry costs of implementation.

The current nearly 2000 pages of legislation, if passed, will be ballooned by the various bureaucracies responsible for their implementation into many tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations and requirements to further complicate, consternate, coagulate and constipate the work of virtually everyone involved in healthcare. It is very expensive to implement complex new rules and regulations throughout an industry; it requires imposing many new responsibilities on existing personnel, extensive revision of policies and procedures, and hiring many additional personnel.

For example, you would be amazed what a massive industry and work force has developed purely to support the requirement for every medical bill to be “properly coded” in order to be paid! Schools all over the country offer degrees in medical coding! These codes contribute absolutely nothing to healthcare quality or affordability. They are purely a tool to allow bureaucrats to micromanage, micro-pay and micro-manipulate doctors’ and patients’ actions, to tremendous net negative effect.

Even if all these new regulations only increase the cost of healthcare by 5%, that will add another 1.1 trillion dollars of costs over the next 10 years. The true cost is likely to be much greater.

Dan Jones, MD

Eureka Springs, Arkansas

JonesPlan.blogspot.com