This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 5th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Nancy Pelosi said of the Affordable Care Act,

we have to pass it to find out what's in it,

she may have been referring to how the law would be interpreted and the

thousands of pages of regulations that had yet to be written.

Josh Blackman, is author of the new book Unravelled, Obamacare, Religious Liberty, and Executive Power.

We spoke last month about how the law has been interpreted and applied.

The Affordable Care Act represented not just a big transformation, a big expansion of government involvement in the

health care sector, but like a lot of legislation it left so many of the details to be sorted out by executive agencies and it almost

seemed as if President Obama and those executive agencies were treating his

law like it was his law and that, well, I get

to decide what this means and what that means by having all this power delegated back to the executive branch by the legislature.

That's exactly right. The ACA was a 3,000 page bill that no one read and then Speaker Pelosi famously said we have to pass the bill to find on what's in it.

And she wasn't being facetious, like it wasn't that this bill would magically sprout

out new words after it was enacted.

It's that the law delegated vast amounts of authority to various

agencies to make decisions affecting health care in all aspects of our life.

To give you a few examples, the so-called contraceptive mandate that requires employers to cover

contraceptives was not in the ACA.

All the ACA said is that employers might provide for women, quote, preventive care.

The agencies have also taken upon themselves to delay various mandates, create exemptions,

...