House Health Care Bill Actually About As Long As Popular Book For Small Children

The GOP has been making great hay out of the length and size and weight and page count of the House Health Care Reform bill. Apparently intimidated by its length, this has put them in this weird oppositional position where they have been insisting that the bill be read while simultaneously attesting to the impossibility of the task. To be sure, the bill looks difficult to tote around -- though Betsy McCaughey's been managing just fine!

Well, as it turns out, the physical bulk of the printed bill conceals an inconvenient truth: it's really not that long a read. The good people at Computational Legal Studies have analyzed the bill, and their findings tend to demonstrate that the GOP is vastly overselling the daunting nature of the task:

Those versed in the typesetting practices of the United States Congress know that the printed version of a bill contains a significant amount of whitespace including non-trivial space between lines, large headers and margins, an embedded table of contents, and large font. For example, consider page 12 of the printed version of H.R. 3962. This page contains fewer than 150 substantive words.

We believe a simple page count vastly overstates the actual length of bill. Rather than use page counts, we counted the number of words contained in the bill and compared these counts to the number of words in the existing United States Code. In addition, we consider the number of text blocks in the bill- where a text block is a unit of text under a section, subsection, clause, or sub-clause.

According to their basic findings, the total number of words in the House Health Reform Bill are 363,086. That includes the words found in titles, tables of contents and the like. The number of "words affecting in H.R. 3962 impacting substantive law" total out to be 234,812.

To be sure, that's a long bill! The 2007 Energy Bill had only 157,835 words, and the 2010 Defense Authorization Act is a trim 119,960 words. But as Computational Legal Studies points out, the total word count of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix is 257,000 words. Granted, it's a more exciting read, but the task of reading that book is something that even small children have proven themselves capable of mastering.

Maybe if we just renamed the bill Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Pre-Existing Conditions, everyone could just get on with it, and stop bitching about how hard legislating is.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to [e-mail] -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

Comments

[Political Conservative]

You're right. The bill is just like the small child's book... both are big fairy tales.

[thefooligan5]

In length the may be similar but that is literally apples and oranges ... "Well they're both round they must taste the same!" In terms of time it takes to digest the two my guess is the Healthcare Bill will take more than 10 times as long to comprehend. Harry Potter can be read in a day and by the end of you'll have no questions about what you just read. It is written so that children can understand. Give this healthcare bill to the general public and tell them they have a day to read it and afterwards you'll have a couple of questions to answer? My guess is there will be universal failure. Have you ever tried reading your credit card rules? These bills read not too much differently. My senators and congresspeople don't read bills. They get the gist of what is inside and tow the party line based on one or two aspects of the bill.

[Labsaregreat]

the similarities are incredible. both are great works of fiction. that the goverment will control costs

[Labsaregreat]

I want to wait for the movie

[b1rd67]

Its already out

www.sicko-themovie.com

[DUSAA-1775]

Some how this piece of trivia is supposed to make the House Bill meaningful??

[SoCalNick]

You must be one of those who were depending on the lame excuse that it was too long to miss the COMICAL point of this great story. No worries you will be hearing this EVERY TIME one of those whiners use that excuse again. There are kids who read ALL of those Harry Potter Books in the same DAY or two after they get them.

But to be fair. They are not handicapped by the fact that they are Lazy , unmotivated , selfish obstructionists with nothing to offer the world but lies.

That is all.

[Political Conservative]

From your comments, it may be possible you haven't tried to read the bill. You can find it at:

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/AAHCA09001xml.pdf

This is not reading for kids.

[Scott3843]

Well, if Boehner and his cohorts hadn't dragged out that huge stack of paper and complained about its length, this wouldn't have been an issue.

It's the whiny, obstructionist repubes who pressed this point. HuffPost is just showing what a petty, misleading stunt that was.

[grf67]

Small children have greater mental capacity than republicans. "My Pet Goat" seems to be the limit of the GOP reading capability.

[Political Conservative]

Did you hear? The Great Library of All Liberal Knowledge burned to the ground. It is reported that both comic books were destroyed!

[pixiepotpie]

LOL. So says one who's opinions are fed to him thru a tube.

[TheHandyman]

The issue is not really the length, the weight, whether it is a best seller, but rather is it a worth while read. A Harry Potter book is about entertainment and making our lives somewhat more enjoyable, even if for a brief time. By making a comparison between the health care reform bill and a work of fiction makes the bill seem somewhat benign. The truth is that neither one has much truth about it. This so called health care plan couldn't be worse if Congress had actually worked at making it the worst possible plan. Instead, they let the former health insurance employees they appointed to their staffs write it and then they let the lobbyist write more amendments to it so that the insurance compnies would get more bang for their buck and the Democan'ts would pass it pretending that it was some piece of historic legislation that would save the health of every citizen when it in fact does no such thing. The Republiwon'ts are just spoiled children who really want to destroy any government that they are not in control of as being wasteful and too big, and inefficient, and they work at making it so. The Demowon'ts just pay lip service to any real Change while preserving their corporate master's wishes to make the People's money their own! One would think that the People would know the difference between fiction and non-fiction but apparently they don't!

[Dalm]

maybe the bill should read: everyones covered.
then everyones happy, short and easy to read for the GOP and people won't die because of lack of money. hurray!

[moutonnoir]

i often get the feeling that our elected officials on both sides of the system are the sorts of people who read very few books.. even books for children strain their attention spans..

the only books they read are probably about themselves... Americans hardly read.. we hate knowledge..

[LaurenMarie984]

"Pat the Bunny" is a daunting task for people who can't read....

[Justadad1]

This is a very good point, but won't convince the right. Many House Republicans have never read anything as long as the Harry Potter books and believe that JK Rowling is an agent of Satan.

[1differentdrummer]

Witchcraft!

[studmoose]

The ones who read HP are probably more emotionally mature than those we elect to office.

Look at how self-serving, deceitful, manipulative, greedy, petty, vindictive and callous politicians are?


If you closed your eyes...

Could you really tell which ones are the teenagers and which ones are the adults?

[littleblackcat]

Yes. The teenagers smell better.

[Decipherer]

Thanks for making this point which I have repeatedly made since Bone'r and the Gee-NO-Pee first started slinging this nonsense around.

When you combine the huge page margins, the fact that the official bill's pages are not 8 1/2 x 11 (they are smaller), the triple-spacing or more, and 16 to 20pt type, 2000 pages could shrink to something far more manageable, even for a Republican.

[BowlyJones]

This is precisely why they ALL have larger office staffs. They have dozens of employees and interns that work in their offices, who can each read a section and highlight the major parts. If you can't, or are not willing, to read a couple of books worth of very important words, you don't deserve to be a congressman. But it's in keeping with the GOP's theme of willful ignorance and pride in know-nothingism.

[taddles]

Is there a special school the go to to learn bloviating and obfuscation?

[moutonnoir]

hehe.. YES! Brigham Young.

They actually believe that the bible happened in america!

[seattleblue]

Maybe the secret to getting politicians to read bills before taking action would be to add some elves, goblins, witches, etc., to the mix. But then the Christians would be up in arms again acting out the Church Lady.