Obamacare Regulations Are 8 Times Longer Than Bible

Since March 2010, when President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and its companion Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA), the administration has published in the Federal Register 109 final regulations governing how Obamacare will be implemented.These regulations add up to 10,516 pages in the Federal Register—or more than eight times as many pages as there are in the Gutenberg Bible, which has 642 two-sided leaves or 1,286 pages.

Using the regulations.gov website and the Federal Register itself, CNSNews.com found 109 distinct regulations for the implementation of PPACA and the health-care related provisions of HCERA that had been finalized by various federal agencies and published in the Federal Register as of Sept. 9, 2013.

The Federal Register publishes documents, including proposed rules, notices, interim rules, corrections, drafts of final rules and final rules. But the CNSNews.com tabulation included only final rules for the implementation of Obamacare.

The 109 final Obamacare rules that have been published in the Federal Register so far take up 10,516 pages in the register. These pages carry an average of about 1,000 words each. So, the final Obamacare regulations published so far amount to approximately 10,516,000 words.

This is only an approximation, of course, because some pages in the Federal Register carry more words than others, and some regulations end in the beginning or middle of a page.

The final Obamacare rules that have been published so far range from the regulation for implementing an excise tax on tanning services, to a 546-page regulation on hospital payment systems, an 196-page regulation on electronic health records, revisions to Medicare and an 111-page regulation for the Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP).

They also include the regulation for implementing the health-insurance premium subsidy that will go to American households that earn less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level and buy their insurance through government-run exchanges.

The Department of Health and Human Services filed the majority of the regulations. But other federal agencies that have filed final Obamacare regulations include the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service, the Office of Personnel Management, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Social Security Administration, and Veterans Affairs.