HHS reg review won’t include new healthcare reform rules

The Health and Human Services Department won’t be revisiting regulations that implement the new healthcare law during its review of potentially burdensome regulations.

Sherry Glied, assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, said the rules are too new for a second look. She testified Monday at a hearing on President Obama’s executive order directing agencies to identify and revise regulations that can be streamlined or eliminated.

Glied said HHS is conducting that review but won’t include regulations that implement the healthcare law. Federal departments assess the costs and benefits of their regulations before issuing them. Because healthcare reform rules were issued so recently, she said, HHS is confident in its analysis of their impacts and doesn’t need to review those rules again.

“Nothing has changed to make us look at them” again, Glied said.

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee took aim at a range of healthcare reform policies during Monday’s hearing, including a perennial favorite for the GOP — waivers from new restrictions on annual benefit limits. 

Although conservatives have criticized HHS for declining to release a list of waiver denials, subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) said the committee probably won’t release that information, either. HHS has provided updates on denied waiver requests.

“I think if a person flunks health care 101, (he) doesn’t want everybody to know it,” Stearns told reporters.

HHS had denied 79 waiver requests as of mid-February. Unions made up the bulk of those early denials, despite Republican lawmakers’ suggestions that unions have benefitted disproportionately from the process. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) repeated that charge Monday, asking whether the administration’s political allies struck a “secret deal with the White House” to get waivers.

The administration has granted nearly 1,400 waivers.

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