I assume most folks reading here are aware that Speaker Pelosi and the House released their version of the combined Health Care bill yesterday. I can only laugh at what is passing for "analysis" of this bill. I think the folks at Ye Olde House of Mulch for Brains (h/t Mr Pierce) though have the Republican talking points down pat.
We can start with the headline (via Yahoo):
Wow. $2.2M per word tells us a lot about the bill doesn’t it? Well not really but let’s see if there’s some further analysis here:
It runs more pages than War and Peace, has nearly five times as many words as the Torah, and its tables of contents alone run far longer than this story.
Oh yeah, that helps a lot doesn’t it?
“Death” and “taxes” are both in there, but “death panel” is not.
Republicans aide said a print-out of the bill weighs more than 19 pounds and stands nearly nine inches tall.
North Carolina Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry, 34 years old and a few inches taller than 5 feet, said the bill could act as a ”booster seat.”
V-e-r-y insightful statements there, huh?
Now my chosen career filed is something called Software Quality Assurance. A strong component of SQA activities is collecting various metrics in an attempt to quantify the progress in Software Development and Engineering. One primary difficulty is determining which metrics will provide the most information to people to know what is happening. When Ye Olde House of Mulch for Brains (and Republicans and Mornin’ Joe) all use metrics like these, the term FAIL is far too kind.
Useless waste of time is the nicest statement I can make for this gibberish.
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The word obviously went out in the forward posts of the GOP/Media Complex to mock the bill’s length, since they couldn’t attack its substance. Boehner was all about the length yesterday. (Um, maybe I shouldn’t be putting “Boehner” and “length” in the same sentence.)
(It should be OK to use the two words together – so long as you avoid other words such as “strength” or “hardness”)
It’s hard for me not to mock Boehner at length…
So important…
Actually, given that the bill reduces the deficit, we’re actually saving $260,000 per word:
http://mediamatters.org/research/200910300009
Now that’s a statistic.
What a straw man argument.
That said, it may be worth noting that the Canadian health care reform bill was Eleven (11) pages long, or so I’m told.
I do understand that often simpler is better. And in the annals of Congressional over-specification, this may be a problem.
Yet, the members of Congress are paid to read these bills, preferably without whining about it. I tried to google and find some history for comparison (say the size of the annual Defense Appropriations Bill or the size of the Patriot Act) but couldn’t really find anything but my WAG is this particular bill is not really excessively large in comparison to most of what they vote on.
I know there are flaws in this bill but telling me that it is $2.2M per word or that it is longer than War and Peace tells me nothing of substance.
(and yeah, the idea that John Boehner or Eric Cantor or any of the other Rs whining about this will actually read the bill is laughable on its face)
If Patrick McHenry stood atop the bill, he might be tall enough to blow Joe Scarborough.
Presumably Scarborough, Politico and the rest of the GOP would like it better if it was five words? HEALTH CARE, FREE FOR ALL.
Yeah, I thought not.
It may be that the US congress is simply unable to do anything concisely–regardless of bill subject or party of origin… but your main point seems absolutely valid to me–if this is all the GOP has left, they’re completely out of ammo and down to throwing rocks. little bitty rocks, at that…
I bet I could type out a MEDICARE FOR ALL bill on one clean sheet of typing paper.
The bills are so thick in order to try to hide what games have been played.
Healthcare for all Americans. would be one sentence on one page.
They have made the cost look like the reason they won’t give us all Healthcare, and would be strident if they had not spent on the wars, bailouts, and Recovery Act, and a zillion other things. The people come last even if it’s with our money. Every thing they do is with our money, so when they say they can’t do something they are talking about not doing it with our money.
http://www.instantrimshot.com
You officially win the internet for the day, Teddy.
Ah, but that’s not what they want to see. Though it would be lovely to watch Mitch McConnell faint into the arms of Orrin Hatch.
These are useless metrics. But the Republicans today were claiming that the length of the bill of 1990 pages meant that it was “a Government takeover of Health Care.”
The GOP Senator involved failed to note that the national health insurance bill, HR 676, which does provide for a Government take-over of health insurance for essential health care products and services is only 30 pages in length.
But…but how many kilobytes does the bill clock in at? I mean, if we can’t measure it by kilobytes, how do we know how long the bill actually is? [I find that the average personal note comes in at three to seven K, the normal editorial at 10 to 12 K & what we consider a lengthy piece starts around 20 K]