Today I had a very long and very boring phone conference with a major regulatory agency entity that oversees a significant contract for my company. We were talking about a data element that has been used in the insurance industry for a significant portion of my life. The discussion was how we used that element for basic system usage and what the major regulatory agency wants us to do with that very well-defined, structured and validated data element. They want the changes in play for last week.
To make a very long and dry story short, if I did to another person what the major regulatory entity wants us to do to that data element, I would rightfully be brought up on charges. My company is pushing back on the requirement because it does not make any sense to change a well defined data element with known properties into a Rorschach blob without any data validation or guidance.
After a forty five minute discussion as to why the major regulatory agency may want to rethink their approach, the representative on the phone (who clearly was not ready for the technical side of the push-back) started saying that we needed to accomdate this change ASAP because of Obamacare.
That was a load of shit as an isomorph of this request was made when Obama was still a Senator considering a run and that request had that same justification and the same technical pushback. After several long and extraordinarily life sucking teleconferences and one road trip to explain to the regulators exactly why this was a dumb idea, they agreed it was a dumb idea. I have at least two or three more phone calls in my future. I am hoping for the trip again as the accomodations are nice in XYZ-ville as the end result will be the same.
Right now, don’t trust anyone who says that policy changes are in healthcare are due to Obamacare unless they can point out the either the immediately relevant sections of the law or can spin out a fairly coherent story that is consistent with both known policy implications and internal incentives. Our wonderful state regulator tried to railroad a dumb idea through on the power of “1/1/14 changes everything so jump” and plenty of other changes that would have occurred in the counter-factual of a non-Obamacare world are happening in an Obamacare world and are being blamed on Obamacare.