US health care reform rages on, inflaming the kind of passions that in the UK are reserved for the hunting of foxes and MPs’ expenses claims. Over the past few weeks the legislative spotlight has moved from the Senate to the House of Representatives, and members of the lower house have been revelling in it. Republican Michele Bachmann has, during the course of her blood feud against the reforms, revealed the Democrats’ bill for what it is: a sinister plot against the elderly and the unborn, complete with death panels and sex clinics. For the Democrats’ Alan Grayson – having reasoned that time spent outlining his own policies is time that can’t be spent bating the opposition – brought a flip-chart with him onto the floor of the House and used it to spell out the Republicans’ alternative health plan as he saw it:
"DON’T GET SICK. AND IF YOU DO GET SICK, DIE QUICKLY."
Asked to apologise the following day he was somewhat less than contrite: “I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.” Cue howls of outrage. In response to these antics, the Speaker kept the entire congress in detention until 11.15 pm last Saturday until it passed health care reform. Eager to go out and play, the nation’s representatives kept their comments on the bill brief and addressed one key question: just how big is it? So now we know that the Affordable Health Care for America Act:
- Is 1,990 pages long. Or 1,995. Or 2,036.
- Contains 363,086 words. Which, after a bit of judicious rounding, is ‘nearly 400,000’.
- Weighs 18 pounds. Or 19. Or 20.
- Is five times longer than the Torah, 860 times longer than the Bill of Rights, and orders of magnitude longer than the Ten Commandments.
- Was not dictated by God.
- Includes 3,425 usages of the word ‘shall’ (but no ‘shalt nots’).
- Can influence tides.
- Is 9% shorter (Democrat metric) or 55% longer (Republican metric) than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
- If cut into strips 0.000666 inches wide would reach all the way from Washington to Moscow.
The reason for this magnitude mania is that as the bill grew in length its detractors cottoned on that they could use the bill itself as a visual metaphor for everything they found objectionable about it: bloated, bureaucratic, inefficient, socialist. Unfortunately, printed out on draft paper it makes a stack barely 6 inches high. No matter: bill killers raided Washington’s stationers for the heaviest stock paper available and managed to bump this up to a full 14 inches, which looks much more impressively bureaucratic when you pile it up on a lectern in front of the TV cameras to denounce it. Meanwhile, the bill’s advocates, on the defensive, desperately pointed out the large font size and very wide margins.
All of which distracts attention from the content, which, whilst a syntactic nightmare, is certainly inclusive: there’s something for everyone to dislike. Liberals bemoan the lack of universal coverage, conservatives the additional taxes, and conspiracy theorists the fact that if you string together the second letter of every third word it spells out the Communist Manifesto. At the risk of over-simplifying this opus, the gist of it is: almost everyone must – on pain of fines or imprisonment or spanking – buy health insurance (potentially subsidised, possibly through an employer, maybe from the government) in an exchange, from insurers who will have to cover anyone who rolls up – even the troublesome, afflicted ones they could previously avoid – apart from those in need of an abortion, who are on their own. The verbiage is the result of putting this into legalese and finding the right form of words to secure the support of moderate Republicans. All one of him.
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