H.R. 3590 (The Health Bill) – It Has Been Read, Understood and Can Be Explained by Yours Truly (Part II) - Why I Read the Bill

As for reading the bill, it had never occurred to me until “Read the Bill!” became a rallying cry for conservative “protesters.”

I think my decision to read it was based on dare. For a nebbishy Jew who can legitimately be accused of being afraid of his own shadow, I am awfully daring. I have bungee-jumped, climbed big rocks, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona (July 13, 1996). If I had the spare cash, I’d be happy to jump out of a plane or get a tattoo. I don’t know why. Sometimes all it takes is an “I dare you,” and I’m in.

Maybe I’m prejudiced, but when I see a few thousand people in front of the Capitol with Nazi-themed posters, I’m going to assume that even though they’re yelling “Read the Bill!” they probably have not read the bill themselves. Also, any representative on the Hill will tell you that most of them never read the bills themselves either.

Also, when the Wall Street Journal published an article dedicated to decrying the volume of the bill, and elected representatives use the size of the bill, histrionically, to entertain the developmentally disabled, I felt that I was dared to read it.

The Length (Oy Gevalt!)
It’s 2074 pages! My Lord. I’ve never read anything that long.

You see, I am a reader. I’ve read War and Peace (1455 pages), Don Quixote (985 pages), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1252 pages), Le Morte d’Arthur (935 pages), and the Lord of the Rings (1008 pages). So I am no stranger to reading, although some of these books I read years ago… when ephedrine was over-the-counter… but still…

So I found the bill online. It was easy enough. In fact, even Senator Ensign (R-Nevada) has a link to it on his web site. This gesture makes me want to forgive him for having an affair with his campaign advisor's wife and then having his parents pay them off.

OK, enough of that. Here it is.

As you can see, it’s pretty fucking big. But I started “leafing” through it and I found something odd. Like any Shakespearean play, every line of a bill is numbered. This allows readers to cite specific pages and line numbers in their arguments/research.

The left margin spans 2 inches to the line number and the vast majority of the text has a combined left margin of 3.25 inches. A piece of paper has 8 inches of horizontal length.

Immediately, almost half of the page is blank. Oh, and every page has a 1.75 inch right margin. That means, for all intents and purposes, more than 62% of the horizontal space of each page is blank.

Oh and I forgot to say that the font is at least 14 pt. Oh, and it’s double-spaced.

It reminds me from when I was in Junior High and I needed to stretch a two-page paper into a five-page paper. I would manipulate the margins and the font so that there would be about four words per page. A lot of us did. It was the advent of the age of word processors and we milked it for all it was worth. Eventually, our teachers caught on and started to give us assignments based on word number.

This gave me an idea. I took a random ten pages from my dusty old copy of War and Peace. Of those ten pages I counted an average of 456 words per page. Then I took a random ten pages of H.R. 3590 and found that there was an average of 143 words per page. Hmmm. So, generally (and generously) I’ll say that each page of the bill is about a third of what a real book is. So, let’s re-evaluate the size, generously again, at about 700 pages.

700 pages isn’t so bad, is it? Let's Get Started...