Spring Cleaning in Washington - Philip K. Howard

You should read this. You really should.

Spring Cleaning in Washington - Philip K. Howard:

"All this accumulated law--about 300,000 pages of federal statutes and regulations--operates as a form of central planning. It bogs people down in bureaucracy. In healthcare, the labyrinthian requirements of Medicare, Medicaid, HIPAA, plus the equally dense, and often conflicting requirements of 50 states, plus the insurance company red tape, make it impossible for people to deliver care efficiently. Add to that bureaucratic nightmare the ever-present fear of being hauled into court whenever a sick person gets sicker, and you have a system that looks like it was designed for frustration and waste. (See here for principles needed to climb out of this rut.)

The inertial forces that make it hard to achieve change in Washington, in the best of circumstances, become a kind of invincible fortress when reinforced by thousands upon thousands of pages of binding law. Each of those provisions is zealously guarded by special interest groups, and changing any word of a statute requires the votes of 218 members of the House and (generally) 60 senators.

Faced with legions of special interests, Congress is trying to fix healthcare by piling new requirements on top of the old ones. But this won't address the underlying problems of efficiency, any more than it could in Detroit. To restore focus and efficiency,"