Opinion Forum

Health Care Monstrosity

October 30th, 2009

According to Politico, the House health care bill (left) now has 1,990 pages. At an estimated cost of $894 billion, that’s about $2.24 million per word. (If you’re a member of congress, of course, you’d probably point out that if it were half as long, it would cost twice as much per word.)

As the report notes, “It runs more pages than War and Peace, has nearly five times as many words as the Torah.” In printed form, the bill is a stack of paper about nine inches tall and weights 19 pounds.

But not to worry. “Democrats say the essence of the bill isn’t much different from the three sister bills they moved through committees this summer, which came in around 1,000 pages [each]. If you read those, they say, you pretty much know what’s in this one.”

Whew! Now I feel better. When they vote on this monstrosity in a week, at least they’ll be able to remember what was in the other bills — if they read them.

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: bill, health care, legislation
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

2 Responses to “Health Care Monstrosity”

Kevin | October 30th, 2009 at 7:03 pm

That is a lot of pages. But I wonder… how many pages do you suppose Blue Cross relies upon internally to structure it’s various health insurance offerings?

Tom | October 30th, 2009 at 7:19 pm

I’m sure health insurance companies have thousands of pages of rules and procedures, plus complicated contracts. But maybe it would be more appropriate to compare the incorporating documents that created the companies with this health care bill. Once the bureaucrats who run things get involved, I’m sure the feds will manage to produce at least as many pages as the insurance companies. Another good comparison might be that private companies have more freedom to hire on the basis of merit than the government does to staff its administrative bureaucracies, with resultant differences in attitude and efficiency.