Veronique de Rugy posts on The Corner:
The Obama administration’s “early interim final” health-care regulations score about the same as the Bush administration’s regulations for homeland security — on the Mercatus Center’s Regulatory Report Card, both would receive an average grade of F.
You can read all three papers here; for a good overview of the issue, you can read this Q&A with Ellig over at CNBC. Brace yourself, because it is painful to read (at least for me)…
I excerpt a portion of that Q&A:
JE: …These analyses also regularly under-estimated costs, over-estimated benefits, and ignored alternatives that would have had lower costs or greater benefits. Scored according to the Mercatus Center’s Regulatory Report Card criteria, the best analysis received just 25 out of 60 possible points—the equivalent of an ‘F’.
LL: An F? So bottom line, based on your research, the government rushed to implement these regulations and now we citizens are stuck with the results?
JE: The regulations we evaluated were all issued as “interim final” regulations, meaning the agencies wrote them without taking public comments on a proposed rule first. In theory, the agencies could go back and revise the regulations before they produce the final version.
In practice, a lot of interim final regulations never get revised.
