Category Archives: regulation

Continued VA Cover-Up

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This time with the VA’s IG participating. It’s an unfortunate side effect of having an organization’s inspection/watchdog function be an internal one, even if it works for the organization’s boss and not for anyone further down the totem pole.

Crucial language that the Department of Veterans Affairs Inspector General could not “conclusively” prove that delays in care caused patient deaths at a Phoenix hospital was added to its final report after a draft version was sent to agency administrators for comment….

The single most compelling sentence in the inspector general’s 143-page final report on fraudulent scheduling practices at the Phoenix veterans’ hospital did not appear in the draft version, according to a staff analysis by the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

It was inserted into the final version, the only one that was released to the public, after agency officials had a chance to comment and recommend revisions.

It’s certainly legitimate for IG draft reports to be run by the group just inspected and about whom the report is being written, but that’s to give the inspectees an opportunity to check facts and to suggest corrections to factual errors. Giving the inspectees the ability to “correct” the conclusions themselves is entirely illegitimate.

A separate report, written by the inspectee, is a normal part of the proceeding. Here, the inspectee indicates its concurrence with IG conclusions and its plan of corrective action regarding those conclusions. It’s also in this separate inspectee response report that the inspectee indicates its disagreement with a conclusion and the reasons for that disagreement.

Then the IG responds, again in a separate report, indicating its acceptance of the inspectee’s disagreement or the IG’s overruling of the inspectee, with the original conclusion standing and the inspectee required to take corrective action. All three of these reports are part of the official record.

Notice that: the legitimate course is to disagree with an IG conclusion, in writing, in a separate report, not to rewrite the IG conclusion itself.

And the cover-up of the cover-up:

The House committee obtained the draft version of the report late Thursday, after the [Washington] Examiner published a story that IG had been refusing its release.

Again, I say, it’s time to disband the VA altogether and send the VA’s existing budget and what would have been its future budgets directly to our veterans as voucher checks with which they can be free to seek out their own doctors and their own medical facilities.

Economic Gains

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President [Barack] Obama used Labor Day to tout the country’s economic gains under his leadership….

Let’s look at those gains.

  • he’s increased the national debt in his six years by 70%—it stood at $10 trillion at the end of 2008; it’s now over $17 trillion
  • median income has fallen—it stands now at $53,900 compared with $56,700 in December 2007 at the start of the current economic dislocation
  • job creation is only just back to pre-Panic levels, 6 years into his administration, compared with normal economic recovery needing only 2-3 years to get to this point
  • unemployment rate now stands at 6.2%, dropping 1.1 points over the past year—still 20% above full employment, and again years behind schedule
  • labor force participation rate is at an historic low
  • GDP growth remains anemic at 1.5%-2.5% year on year (with this year’s growth rate projected to be in the 2.5% range) compared to a normal economic recovery growth rate in the 4.5%-6.5% range.

And this graph sums it all up:RecoveryComparison_Cox

Obama, in the same appearance, also claimed that “higher wages and other progress for workers can only be achieved through a Democrat-controlled Congress.”

Really? Can our country afford more of this Progressive progress?

Obamacare and ObamaMart Strike Again

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In the continuing story of ObamaMart’s still incomplete (!) backend, the part of the Web site that takes the citizen’s input and sorts it, collates it with other government information, and then passes it on to other relevant parties—the health plan providers, for instance, and the IRS—there’s this:

Because of complicated connections between the new health care law and income taxes, the Department of Health and Human Services must send out millions of new tax forms next year.

The forms are called 1095-As, and list who in each household has health coverage, and how much the government paid each month to subsidize those insurance premiums. Nearly 5 million people have gotten subsidies through HealthCare.gov.

If the forms are delayed past their Jan 31 deadline, some people may have to wait to file tax returns—and collect their refunds.

A delay of a week or two may not sound like much, but many people depend on their tax refunds to plug holes in family finances.

That folks should better plan their withholding (where possible) and not extend Uncle Sugar a year-long interest-free loan is a separate story. Such planning is typical, and the folks who do this the most are the poorest among us—the very folks President Barack Obama and his ilk claim to be trying to help.

And there’s the coming collapse of employer-provided health plans.

Analysts predict that as ObamaCare takes hold, it will mean the end of employer-provided insurance….

The Wall Street research firm S&P IQ went even further, predicting 90% of such plans will disappear.

Now, I don’t see such an eventuality as necessarily a bad thing. Employer-supplied health plans should be what employer-supplied insurance plans used to be, when the practice began: a matter of employment compensation negotiation between employer and (prospective) employee. What interests me here is the hypocrisy of the thing.

President Barack Obama promised, repeatedly, that

you can keep your plan and your doctor, no matter what[.]

If you lose your employer-supplied health plan, you lose with that “your plan and your doctor” bit. Which, of course, Obama knew at the time he was making those promises. He even bragged about it to then Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the infamous health summit.

Also, when Presidential Candidate Barack Obama was debating Presidential Candidate John McCain in 2008, he decried McCain’s health insurance industry reform proposal as being destructive of employer-supplied health insurance.

[T]his would lead to the unraveling of the employer-based health care system. That, I don’t think, is the kind of change that we need.

Hmm….

More Federal Arrogance

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…EPA style.

Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX) is highlighting [follow the links there for his letter to EPA Director Gina “Joe” McCarthy and for the EPA’s maps) a new example of this: EPA rule-making regarding waterways, particularly those on private land and how those private property owners must handle water on their property. In support of this new rule-making effort (although the EPA denies it’s in support), the EPA has generated highly detailed maps of every waterway in the US—down to what it classifies as “ephemeral streams,” or streams that only have water in them as a result of rain falling. Such “streams” include ditches on private property, runoff through a depression in someone’s yard, and so on.

EPA Press Secretary Liz Purchia insists, regarding any mapping effort related to this rule-making effort, that any maps actually related to their rule(s) would have to include ground surveys in order to support the proposed rule, and she said that would be “prohibitively expensive.”

We’re left to conclude, then, that the EPA is holding itself willfully ignorant of the extent and effect of its rule because finding that out would be inconvenient. Yet the EPA is going ahead with its rule, anyway.

Oh, and those extremely detailed maps—themselves expensive enough to generate that the EPA is reluctant to discuss the terms of the contract with the map generator—were generated on the taxpayer dime solely for…because.

Hmm….

More Regulatory…Foolishness

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Gordon Crovitz identified some.

The Obama administration’s standard reaction to technological innovation has been to block change via regulation….

Federal regulators are also putting the brakes on self-driving cars, which are closely related to the Uber innovation—enabling riders to order a car service using their smartphone app. If fast-moving technology hadn’t collided with slow-moving regulators, this might have been the last summer you’d have to drive your own car.

And

US regulators won’t let car manufacturers go much beyond what Mercedes now offers [active cruise control, automatic braking and lane-keeping technologies]. That means car makers can’t roll out technologies they already have, and auto makers in Europe, which has fewer regulations limiting technology, have surpassed their US competitors.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has warned states not to allow fully self-driving cars, like the one Google is developing, except for testing purposes. The agency says it’s working on a study that will take at least until 2017. Regulators say they’ll release performance metrics for self-driving features, then run the tests, then issue regulations, and only then permit sales. Meanwhile, the agency has delayed a plan by Tesla to replace traditional side mirrors with more effective cameras.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not this technology works as well as advertised. Existing liability law will deal with failures. This is Big Government regulating for no other reason than that it can. This produces the opposite of what government is required to do; one aspect of this requirement being clearly laid out in Art I, Sect 8, of our Constitution: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts….

Because, Big Government. Now shut up, and quit arguing.