Layer upon layer of regulations are heaped onto health care. This not only causes distortions in the market but contributes to increases in costs and therefore decreased income for health care professionals 5. During this next session we must meet the challenge to pay for the explosive demand of medical services which will be required as the nation's population ages. We must overhaul a system which has been mired down in complex rules and regulations in order to meet the needs of our children's generation and beyond. The mountain of Medicare paperwork is overwhelming.
Doctors face a morass of cumbersome rules and strangling regulations.
For example, the Health Care Financing Administration uses 23 different forms to administer its program and the scope of its regulations covers virtually every aspect of the financing and delivery of health care services. There are over 111,000 pages of laws, guidelines, and rules, relating to the Medicare program and the Administration continues to add to the regulatory morass. This places an undue burden on physicians as they attempt to provide health care to Americans. The size and complexity of Medicare places physicians in a precarious state, since the federal government does not distinguish clearly between outright fraud and honest billing mistakes by doctors as they try to shift through the mountain of rules and regulations which govern the Medicare program. Medicare's administrative costs are deceptive and do not take into account the cost of compliance and transactions imposed on hundreds of thousands of doctors and the thousands of hospital who must wrestle with the administrative requirements of Medicare's rules, regulations, and guidelines .