Ezra Klein has an interesting quote on how Republican false claims become regarded as fact, quoting from Health Affairs:
ONE HUNDRED THIRTY thousand pages of Medicare regulations stifle provider innovation. We know that because conservative politicians such as Newt Gingrich tell us this every chance they get. The evidence? A decade ago, the estimable Mayo Clinic added up the pages; who, after all, doesn’t believe the Mayo Clinic? This nugget, demonstrating regulation run amok, even made it into the talking points that candidate George Bush used against Al Gore in one of their 2000 debates, although Bush managed to mangle the details.
The only problem is that the number 130,000 is wrong—not just a little wrong, but about 127,500 pages wrong. I know this because as a senior political appointee at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), I was selected to defend the number in a congressional hearing. In fact, most of what Mayo counted as pages of regulations were newsletters, nonprecedential payment appeal decisions, and other assorted tidbits, many going back fifteen years. Medicare-related? Yes. Regulations? Not even close.
Sure, Medicare is a government program and that means that lots of paper gets generated due to the bureaucratic mind set, even if the amount is greatly exaggerated. However that doesn’t mean it is all bad. Medicare, as well as all other payers, has rules about what they will pay for and under what circumstances. Thanks to all the paperwork generated by Medicare (with information also available on line) I have a far better chance at knowing how much Medicare will pay for a service and whether there will be any obstacles to getting paid.
Looking at my medical practice from a business perspective, this makes it far easier to plan decide upon business changes. That’s quite different from the conservative spin that Medicare’s regulations stifle provider innovation. Republican businessmen should understand the value of information for business planning and innovation.
