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Conservative group: New healthcare rules add $9B in costs, 10M hours in paperwork
A trio of healthcare rules proposed over the course of four days this month by the Obama administration would account for more than $9 billion in new costs and more than 10 million hours of added paperwork in the coming years, a conservative policy group says.
Analysis conducted by the American Action Forum (AAF), which tracks federal regulations, looked at one rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), along with a pair of proposed rules set forth by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA.)
The healthcare proposal is meant to help states implement Medicaid eligibility changes. Over a five-year period, the rule will cost roughly $2.6 billion and some 518,432 hours of paperwork, AAF concluded in the analysis. Benefits from the rule were not quantified.
The FDA rules stem from the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act, which aims to reduce cases of food-borne illness. AAF estimates those rules together could cost up to $6.5 billion over seven years, and lead to more than 10 million hours of paperwork burden.
The FDA maintains the benefits related to cutting down on illness outbreaks outweigh the costs of the proposed regulations.
Sam Batkins, the Forum’s director of regulatory policy, suggested that the government may need to check its math.
“With more than $9 billion in possible costs in one week, consumers, farmers, and businesses might also question the administration’s benefit-cost calculus,” he wrote in the analysis.
