It will take 1,500 nurses working full-time to do the paperwork as healthcare costs just went up $ 173 million each day, all thanks to new federal red tape. And that’s just for starters; those costs will grow.
Why? Because an “emergency” federal rule requires thousands of hospitals, clinics, medical laboratories, and nursing homes each week (and often each day) to send massive new reports to the government, supposedly improving how COVID-19 is monitored. Reporting is almost doubled, and it’s not just about cases and testing. It also includes real-time inventories of supplies, like personal protective equipment, and lots more.
Will expensive new monitoring lead to better treatments? That’s the theory.
Yet this is the sixth change this year of reporting requirements, and it’s the biggest of them all: It includes replacing the former data systems with a new private vendor, TeleTracking Technologies. Because that’s a private contract, part of the privatization effort headed by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, leftist media criticize TeleTracking’s CEO for his links to the New York real estate world.
But that distracts from the real problem, which is the gargantuan new red tape. Although the government will forgive itself for making mistakes, if any healthcare provider makes mistakes using the new system, it can be fined $ 10,000 for each mistake — each day.
The late-August “emergency” rule comes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as part of the Department of Health and Human Services. For brave souls wanting to read the 202-page document, it’s online here. But beware. As the regulation admits (page 172), trying to decipher it is expensive and will cost each provider “from $ 24,917 to $ 29,900 to identify the applicable legal obligations and to develop the updated standards needed.” Then add a collective “$ 78,240,979 to $ 109,537,371” for implementation costs (page 171).
But that money is just for starters, a mere drop in the bucket. The rule also predicts (Table 6, page 154) a daily cost of $ 173 million for medical laboratories alone to try to comply. Plus, the bureaucrats expect to hit the laboratories with fines (which bureaucrats call “civil money penalties”) that (page 174) “range from $ 8,122,000 to $ 62,945,500″ the first year — that’s if the average fine is a mere $ 1,000 instead of the permitted $ 10,000 fine.
As Table 10 says, the expected annual compliance cost to medical labs is $ 4.3 billion a year.
That still isn’t everything. The $ 4.3 billion is just for medical labs and does not include the compliance costs to hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes. The official projection (page 146, table 3) is that obedience will require 3 million man-hours a year for hospitals, a burden falling mostly on nurses. That’s like 1,500 full-time nurses doing nothing except new COVID-19 paperwork.
The worst burden might be on already-struggling small rural hospitals. As stated on page 154, “This rule will have a significant impact on the operations of a substantial number of small rural hospitals.” But no more specific cost projections are given for those, nor for nursing homes, although many other pricey estimates are included in the official rule.
All this cumbersome new red tape is open-ended because the Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized the right on page 1 (and many other pages) to revise and expand the requirements whenever he wishes.
Imagine being fined $ 10,000 each day, maybe for submitting the wrong count of your face masks or hand sanitizer. Or stating the wrong number of those “exposed” to COVID-19. Or because you couldn’t figure out the bureaucratic lingo such as:
That passage is marked as “clarifying” language. (Don’t bother rereading it unless you’ve got a team of lawyers on speed-dial.)
The new rule shows no mercy. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Health and Human Services promise to be more vigilant than ever in assessing fines: “We are enforcing the new reporting requirements through the imposition of [civil money penalties] for each time a facility fails to report the required data.” (Page 17) The fines are to phase-in, but $ 1,000 a day will be the minimum for a first offense, which then increases for any others.
There’s even a threat to cut off federal funds entirely for those who don’t comply — which threatens 40% or more of their budget for most facilities.
The government could do better by providing incentives to cooperate rather than using nothing but heavy-handed punishment. Everybody else may consider healthcare workers as heroes, but the feds are treating them like villains.
Former congressman Ernest Istook is founder and president of the non-profit, Americans For Less Regulation.