Regulatory costs hardly moved this week, with just $15.4 million in published costs and 18,400 paperwork burden hours. Outside of FAA airworthiness directives, the IRS published a minor proposal implementing the Affordable Care Act, and the Federal Reserve proposed a rule to maintain an account for financial market utilities. Neither proposal carries significant costs or paperwork burden hours.
On Tuesday, Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) released a pair of bills aimed at reforming Dodd-Frank. The first, technical corrections, seeks to make perfunctory changes to grammatical and technical errors in the bill itself.
A mantra heard from Western European socialists and American progressives is that a political economy of frontier-style, “cowboy capitalism” runs amok across the fruited plains of the United States. Based on this ideological view of the U.S. business environment, one would think that a pro-market, libertarian utopia existed in America, unfettered by the visible hand of government. The reality, however, is quite different.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) added five regulations to the Federal Register this week. Combined, the five final rules include $100 million in costs and more than 300,000 paperwork burden hours; none of the rules quantified benefits. For the week, regulators published $255 million in costs and added 288,000 hours of paperwork.
With the implementation of the 2,800 page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Affordable Care Act”), the projected access of 34 million additional Americans to health insurance, along with the growth in both the general and aging population, is placing greater emphasis on the need for an increase in the number of primary care physicians (“PCPs”).
Regulatory burdens increased modestly this week, with $130 million in costs and more than 308,000 paperwork burden hours. A proposed Affordable Care Act regulation imposing medical loss ratio (MLR) requirements for Medicare Advantage plans highlighted the week.
For the U.S. manufacturing sector to prosper over the next quarter century and beyond, it must have an energy power source that is both cost-efficient and reliable as to domestic supply. Moreover, although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that the manufacturing sector is responsible for only 4.6 percent of total U.S.
For the first week in 2013, regulatory costs declined, by $16 million. Despite the drop in costs, driven by EPA’s Portland Cement amendments, regulators published more than 3.2 million paperwork burden hours. Dodd-Frank added more than 1.6 million to the paperwork tally this week.
Despite a $3.3 billion regulatory savings proposal from the administration, the overall burden still increased by more than $80 million this week. A final Affordable Care Act regulation and two costly EPA regulations drove many of the burdens.
