Daniel F. Craviotto Jr., an orthopedic surgeon in California, explains in the Wall Street Journal how bureaucrats are wasting his time and your money.

It comes down to government mandates. Rules on how to practice may be meant well, but they do not work well in practice, Craviotto writes:

“The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services dictates that we must use an electronic health record (EHR) or be penalized with lower reimbursements in the future. There are ‘meaningful use’ criteria whereby the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tells us as physicians what we need to include in the electronic health record or we will not be subsidized the cost of converting to the electronic system and we will be penalized by lower reimbursements. Across the country, doctors waste precious time filling in unnecessary electronic-record fields just to satisfy a regulatory measure. I personally spend two hours a day dictating and documenting electronic health records just so I can be paid and not face a government audit. Is that the best use of time for a highly trained surgical specialist?”

Obamacare’s approach is to impose still more mandates. Bureaucrats will dictate practice on the theory this will improve medicine. Craviotto ask the crucial question: “We have let nearly everyone trespass on the practice of medicine. Are we better for it? Has it improved quality?”