One of the strangest and most annoying Republican talking points about the Democrats’ health care bill is that’s it too long. We’ve heard this from them almost non-stop since the House bill was introduced last year.
[T]his legislation actually uses the word ’shall’ 3,425 times. After weeks of backroom negotiations, now the Democrats have emerged with a bill that isn’t a thousand pages; it’s 1,990 pages.
So how much takeover can you cram into 2,000 pages? By comparison, the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, which now cost nearly $800 billion annually, was less than 300 pages long. So at 2,000 pages today, that’s a whole lot of government input for a plan the Speaker says won’t result in Washington taking over health care.
And John Boehner:
[t]he fact that it weighs in at nearly 2,000 pages — more than 620 pages longer than the government takeover of health care Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993 — is as good an indication as any of just how costly and unsustainable Speaker Pelosi’s proposal is.
Cue John Boehner’s spokesman, today.
“The White House’s ‘plan’ consists of an 11-page outline, which has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office or posted online as legislative text. So they want to reorganize one-sixth of the United States’ economy with a document shorter than a comic book, and they’re complaining that they can’t find our plan on their own website? C’mon.“
You just can’t make this shit up.
