Common Good and the Bipartisan Policy Center teamed up for an eye-opening Forum on Obsolete Law recently. Speakers hailing from across the spectrum weighed in on government’s desperate need for a spring cleaning. After decades of laws piling up—there are a reported 160,000 pages of regulations—the system has become an immobile beast and common sense has been thrown out the window.

Let’s face it, laws are destined to become obsolete, especially in today’s society where human knowledge is growing, globalization is booming, politics are polarized and economic, technological and social change is evolving faster than we can keep up with. Operating on rules that were put in place in the 60’s and 70’s— when health care regulation was primarily formulated—doesn’t make any sense. As Phillip Howard from Common Good put it, “government is run by dead people.”

A common topic of discussion was the need to move away from incentivizing regulators to add more and more policies regardless of how they perform, and instead implement a “look back” element that evaluates the effectiveness of laws and eliminates legal build-up. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) believes the British government is on to something with their “one in one out” model, which requires an outdated bill to be removed from the books whenever a new bill is enacted.

Health care was injected throughout the forum to demonstrate how too much regulation can inhibit innovation. The SGR was mentioned as a prime example of Congress kicking the can down the road for the past decade instead of overhauling the flawed formula in order to protect reimbursement rates. The panel also discussed how physicians’ omnipresent fear of being sued coupled with a straight fee-for-service system has resulted in unnecessary testing that contributes to rising health care costs. What option do we have as physicians? We’ve been backed into a corner and will be stuck there until something is done that allows us to practice without fear.

So what is the solution to the issue of obsolete law? In a room full of lawmakers, CEOs, political scientists and professors, no one had the magic formula for tackling this mess, of course. While the panel had a wide range of suggestions, the resounding theme was the need for spring-cleaning and simplification, restoring a nimble, user- friendly government in these rapidly changing times.