On the recordMarch 21, 2012
if I could add one thing at this point, we don't really know how bad this law is yet. I am going to add something to what Senator Blunt said when he quoted the Speaker of the House saying that we don't really know what is in this bill and we are going to have to pass it to find out what is in it. That is what she had to say to get a majority vote even within her own party to get it through the House of Representatives. But, in a sense, she is right. One could understand every letter of this law, but it has 1,693 delegations of authority for the Secretary to write regulations, and until they are written, we aren't really going to know what is in it. We remember the accountable care organization rules that came out. Six pages out of 2,700 in the bill dealt with accountable care organizations, but the first regulations that were written were 350 pages long. So we really won't know how bad this legislation is maybe for a few years down the road, and hopefully we never get that far down the road.
