Nicholas Mukhtar’s critique of regulatory burden starts from an unusual place for a management consultant: he isn’t arguing for less regulation. He is arguing that the accumulation of otherwise reasonable rules has built systems too complicated for small operators to run. That framing puts him at odds with both sides of the usual regulatory debate, since he isn’t asking for fewer rules any more than he’s defending the current volume of them.

“Regulatory bodies serve an important function, and I’m not anti-regulation. But I am pro-simplification. The more complex we make these systems, the more the people at the bottom get hurt,” Mukhtar said, describing a pattern he sees across health care and financial advising.

Health Care Shows the Clearest Example

“We are in a very overly regulated, overly complex healthcare market,” Mukhtar said, pointing to physicians who now spend 7.3 hours a week on prior authorization and insurance paperwork and another 13 hours on documentation and order entry, on top of direct patient care, inside a 57.8-hour average workweek reported for 2024.

Large hospital systems absorb that load with dedicated compliance staff. A two-person practice cannot, which pushes independent doctors toward consolidation or closure and thins out patient access in communities that already have few providers.

Primary care access has already contracted in some underserved communities as a result, and consolidation among providers tends to raise prices rather than lower them, an outcome regulators aiming to protect patients rarely intend to produce.

Finance Carries a Version of the Same Weight

Investment advisers face a parallel burden managing requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA. Among firms surveyed for the 2025 Investment Management Compliance Testing Survey, 63% of chief compliance officers hold at least one additional role at their firm beyond compliance duties, a workload split that mirrors what Mukhtar describes in medicine.

Small advisory firms feel that split hardest, since compliance staff there are often doing core client work at the same time, leaving neither task fully covered. The distinction between too many rules and too much accumulated complexity matters because the fixes differ: repealing a regulation requires a legislative or agency process that can take years, while simplifying how a firm complies with the rules already in place is something leadership can start on immediately.

Mukhtar’s client work in both industries points to the same starting move: audit which internal approvals, forms and sign-offs actually trace back to an outside requirement, and which ones a prior manager simply added and nobody ever removed.