The first of these looks as intricate as an integrated circuit. Titled “Your New Health Care System,” this schematic shows how Obamacare’s hundreds of moving parts will fit together and whirl — or not, as rising health costs at Boeing, McDonald’s, and the United Federation of Teachers (to name a few affected organizations) already reveal:
Staff members at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee “spent four months, night and day, and weekends”
assembling this amazing graphic, Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas) tells me by phone. “They vetted it based on all 2,801 pages of the Obamacare legislation. They captured this new law’s stunningly complexity.”
Well, almost.
Literally scores of icons and symbols show how the president, the secretary of health and human services, the IRS, and other existing federal actors and agencies interact with Obamacare’s new entities including, among many others, the Elder Justice Coordinating Council, the Medicare Prescription Drug and MA-PD Complaint System, and the National Oral Health Public Education Campaign.
Even worse, the JEC’s diligent personnel could not fit all of this new law’s boards, commissions, mandates, and other elements onto this chart. So, by way of shorthand, they created “bundles of bureaucracy.” Beyond those functions delineated in the chart, these seven collective symbols respectively represent clusters of four loan repayment and forgiveness programs, four other new regulatory programs, 17 insurance mandates, 19 special-interest provisions, 22 other new bureaucracies, 26 other new demonstration and pilot programs, and 59 other new grant programs. These 151 additional items within Obamacare do not appear individually on this diagram. As Representative Brady explains, “If we included all of these units, this chart would be three times larger.”
Anyone who believes the JEC concocted this out of thin air should think again. Beneath each new program or agency, policy analysts cited the section in the Obamacare law that empowers that particular intervention in the American people’s medical decisions. The lines that connect programs to mandates indicate the pertinent passages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that bind them together.
The JEC’s 25-megabyte creation is difficult to transmit via e-mail. However, a
convenient link opens a PDF that allows readers to zoom in and explore this chart in amazing and shocking detail.
