A few days ago I received my renewal notice from Kaiser Permanente. The first sentence of this letter read as follows:

The landmark Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act represents the most significant change to the U.S. health care system in 45 years.

The letter was several pages long. I won’t bore you with the details, but basically it was explaining that my plan is a “grandfathered” plan. There was even a page with a list of translators on call who could answer any questions–in about 20 languages.

However, the entire package was just plain nonsense. The reality is that none of this was necessary for any reason other than to comply with the new regulations. So, after carefully reading all the disclosure documents, I discovered the following two paragraphs:

The only difference between grandfathered and nongrandfathered health plan benefits and coverage matrices is the following notice of grandfathered status that appears in the grandfathered version:

Health Plan believes this coverage is a grandfathered health plan under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. If you have any questions about grandfathered health plans, please call our Member Service Call Center.

In other words, Kaiser Permanente had to spend a fortune alerting everyone that nothing has changed. They obviously had to train people to handle phone calls from members who do not understand the significance of this meaningless change. Actually, it is not even a meaningless change; instead, it is a detailed explanation of no change at all, along with specific guidelines on how to get additional help if you don’t understand the significance of nothing. This exercise in futility was a direct result of complying with “ObamaCare,” designed to save billions by reducing the cost of insurance through streamlined processing. Please!

This is typical of what happens when the government tries to manage anything. Everyone wastes enormous amounts of time and expense complying with meaningless regulations that change nothing.

This reminds me of growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Since it snowed most of the time, we came up with games to play in the snow. One game we played was trying to see who could walk the straightest line across a field. Then we would look back at our footprints in the snow. If you did this by watching each step and trying to make each step perfect, when you got to the other side of the field and looked back, you discovered that you had actually wandered all over the place. But, if you picked out a tree or a house on the other side of the field, and just walked straight toward it, you were able to walk a straight line.

No matter how they spin it, micromanagement of the health system by the federal government is doomed to fail. If, and when, we do get to the other side of the field, we will soon discover that we wasted a lot of time and energy trying the impossible. But, the trip will be well documented.

TDM