The Facts
The process the McConnell folks used is fairly simple. They went to
the Web site for the Federal Register and searched for “Affordable Care Act,” the official name for the health-care law. That turned up 897 documents.
On the Web site, there’s a button that will download the documents to an Excel spreadsheet (CVS/excel). Then you use the sum feature on Excel to add up the pages and presto, you end with 20,202 pages. These were then printed out and duly stacked in a pile.
“Some of these may only relate to ‘Obamacare’ (rather than being entirely on ‘Obamacare’
, but since they’re related, they’re part of the regulatory structure,” said Don Stewart, McConnell’s spokesman.
Regular readers know that we
frown on such page-counting exercises, since we’re not sure what it really tells you. In the case of the health-care law, businesses actually have been seeking detailed regulations so they know exactly what to expect. And using the same methods used by the McConnell team, we found tens of thousands of pages of regulations for Medicare Advantage and the prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D), which were pushed by Republicans.
Stewart countered that it would be fairer to count only the regs issued 1,148 days after the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 was enacted, since it’s exactly that long since the Affordable Care Act became law. By his count, that yields about 5,000 pages of regulations, or roughly one-quarter of the number for Obamacare.
There’s another wrinkle, too. The documents that turn up are both final rules and proposed rules, as well as “notices” (such as for new funding or
committee meetings) and “presidential documents” (mostly news releases). But the proposed rules are often similar to the final rules, except that the final rules include pages of public comments. Looking just at rules, you end up with just 9,625 pages, while proposed rules amount to 7,432 pages.
One could argue that this amounts to double counting, since the final regulations, not the proposed rules, are what matters to business. Stewart begs to differ: “If you’re affected by the regulations, you have to know and understand the proposed rule so you can comment on it, and you have to know the actual rule because you have to try and live with it.”
In any case, note how McConnell referred to “rules and regulations already associated with this law.” In this way, he neatly sidesteps the question of whether he is referring just to the final regulations.
Moreover, all of these rules, proposed rules, notices and the like are listed on
the administration’s Health Reform page on the Federal Register Web site.
Stewart pointed out that McConnell’s office counted only Federal Register pages, which are typed in such tiny type that each page is worth almost four pages with regular, double-spaced type. By that logic, 10,000 pages of final rules could be labeled as 40,000 pages. “So if anything, we’re undercounting,” he said.
An administration official said most of the rules related to the implementation of the law are complete but there are still rules that have not been finalized or issued. “We will continue to issue guidance and rules from time to time to respond to stakeholder questions or respond to guidance,” the official said.
