By
Erich Vieth on November 07th, 2009
It would be irresponsible to take a position on the new House version of the health care bill without reading it, right? Despite the importance and expense of the bill, many national news websites don’t even contain a link to the actual words of the bill. Therefore, go to this link and read the full text of the bill. It’s almost 2,000 pages long and it’s loaded with specialized terminology and ambiguities. To read it, you’ll need to give up many hours of your life.
I’m a lawyer, and I read difficult documents all day at work. I can guarantee that it would take me more than a week to read this bill and to obtain a thorough understanding of its main provisions. How many Americans would be willing to read this bill without being required to read it as part of a special healthcare-related job (much less understand it) prior to taking a position on it? Probably only a handful. Out of almost 300,000,000 Americas, only a few would exert the effort to read the entire thing. In fact, send in a comment if you are not being paid to read this bill, and you’ve nonetheless read it on your own just to be an informed citizen.
This House bill will eventually need to be reconciled with a Senate bill, which will be comparable in length and complexity. Completely responsible people will read both versions and map out the differences. That could take many weeks, even for those of us who are even able to analyze text at this level. To really follow this legislation in real time would require one to give up everything he or she cares about for many weeks. It means giving up time with one’s family, exercising, entertainment and probably burning vacation time at work. I doubt that it is a rare legislator has read more than 1/4 of this bill.
What does it mean when it takes 2,000 words to put an idea into a law containing numerous vague provisions? I have become cynical about this process (as you can probably tell). My presumption is that this bill is representative of many modern pieces of federal legislation (there are many other similarly long and vague federal laws that have been passed over the past couple of decades). My suspicion is that when a bill is written in lengthy prose that is often vague, it means that it is intentionally written this way to discourage ordinary people from understanding it. It is written with lots of bells and whistles that will work to the benefit of private businesses. It is written for those who can afford to hire teams of lawyers who can “work” the law to their advantage in federal courts. Something for everyone who can afford to litigate, it seems, based on the many provisions.
Or would it be more accurate to say that this bill is an attempt to put off for another day the dirty details of who, exactly will be covered, whether those who are being insured by the federal government get the same gold-plated coverage as those who work hard to shell out $1,000/month to insure their families, how much it will really cost to give this kind of coverage to the poor and working poor, who will pay for it in the end and what will we no longer be able to afford as a country given that we are going to be paying a presumably huge sum for health care? These are the kinds of questions that good and decent people want to know before they make a commitment.
I should make it clear that the current system is terrible in many ways, both for people who are insured and those who aren’t. We need a new law to keep purchasers of health insurance from getting ripped off by insurers, but this is low-hanging fruit that could be knocked out with a 10-page bill. We also need to figure out some affordable level of coverage to provide to those who we feel moral compulsions to cover. I suspect that all of this could be done in far less than 2,000 pages.
Like I mentioned, I’m suspicious about this process, which has proven to be opaque in more ways than one.
Seeing this bill makes me realize how daunting it is for most folks to “get involved” in the government process. No wonder so many people, driven by emotions, give up entirely and insist that living locally can take care of national or global problems. These include many of the “free market fundamentalists,” as well as many others who haven’t quite articulated why they are so reluctant to get involved.
