Republican Healthcare and the Case of the Cursed System

In an effort to be a hypocrite (or more accurately, to engage in a ridiculous debate that I find both meaningless and distracting in an effort to demonstrate how meaningless and distracting it really is), I have decided to harp on the length of a bill.

The Republicans have introduced their alternative to the House healthcare bill. It is 219 pages long. This might seem reasonable, except that, as any college professor knows, the number of pages a document has tells you absolutely nothing about how long a document is. Since most people don't read legislation, most people don't know that a single page of legislative text only holds somewhere between 130-180 words. In single-spaced, consecutive (no paragraph breaks), 12-point Times New Roman Font, this is only about a third of a page in a MicroSoft Word Document.

So, even giving the Republican bill the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that every page contains the maximum number of words (which is clearly not the case), the bill can be estimated at around 39,420 words long. Let's be even more generous and say that it's 40,000, just to make it a round number. That puts the length of the bill somewhere around the low end of the spectrum for a young adult novel. Maybe this is the way to get pre-teens involved in politics...

So, will Tom Swift invent a way to handle electronic medical records that will save millions in costs annually? Will Nancy Drew uncover an alternative to employer-based health benefits? Can the Hardy boys team up with a gruff, but lovable boat captain to discover a way to provide universal coverage?

My guess is they won't.

Update: Including the title, author, info, labels, and this update, this blog post is 335 words long. That’s 335 words longer than the Republican alternative proposal for fighting global warming.

Congress and UFOs

Against my better judgment (I've got to stop starting posts this way) I decided to read Michael Gerson's column in the Washington Post today. The piece discusses the Virginia gubernatorial election and compares the poor poll numbers for Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds to poll numbers for Barack Obama.

Like a good Conservative, Gerson trots out all the half-baked talking points about how Obama is not the President we thought we were getting, how he's ineffective because he's negative on his critics, and how he has "suffered the largest decline in approval, at this point in his term, of any elected president since 1953".

Let's start with this last line. The President has suffered the largest decline in approval since [insert random date and time period here]. Nevermind that this is largely due to his astronomically high poll numbers when his presidency began, or that his approval still remains above 50%. And of course, this statistic is often paired with this another Gerson pulls out of the "important-sounding but meaningless" file: "fewer Americans approve of the job done by Congress than believe in UFOs."

Okay, first off, a lot of people believe in UFOs (and of course, there's always the fact that any object seen flying that cannot be identified is, in fact, a UFO. I've seen one myself, and my whole family can corroborate the story, as well as a TV special I saw once on UFOs that showed the exact same thing we saw). But even more relevant than the subscriber rate to UFO existence theory is the fact that nobody ever approves of the job Congress does. My theory is that this has a lot to do with the fact that most people have no idea what it is the Congress is supposed to do. Since they don't know what the Congress does, clearly Congress must not be doing it very well. I would like to see the Congressional approval poll question taken alongside a quiz on the legislative branch, with such questions as:

1) How many chambers does our federal legislature have, and what are they called?
2) Who is your district's Representative?
3) How many Senators does your state have?
4) What does a legislature do?
5) What is the relationship between Congress and UFOs?

If they can answer all of those questions correctly, then their opinion on the job Congress does will mean something. Until then, everyone, please ignore those stupid, meaningless polls.

Beyond statistics, however, Mr. Gerson says Obama is "too small to be an effective president." Of course, this neglects the fact that under Obama's leadership, healthcare reform (one of the most difficult issues our country faces) is closer than ever to being enacted. No bill has ever made it out of committee before, yet here we stand, with 3 House Committees and 2 Senate Committees all having approved their versions of the bill, and the House standing prepared to vote on their version. Additionally, the process on a bill to mitigate climate change has moved farther than ever before, and Obama has stated his intention to make this his next big priority. Those two issues alone have more than once been deemed politically impossible, yet here we are, moving forward. All this in less than a year, and under the weight of having inherited one of the nation's greatest economic crises, which looms over his head like something out of a Poe short story.

Of course, in the economic vein, there's also the fact that just yesterday, as Gerson was likely writing his column, we learned that that in the 3rd quarter U.S. GDP grew 3.5%, after having contracted in the previous quarters. It's hard to imagine that federal policy had nothing to do with that. For the uninitiated, a growth in GDP means, in literal economic terms, that the recession is over.

Now I'm no Obama apologist, and I think there's a lot more he can do. The point of my piece here is to note that, while it may be fun for conservatives to imagine Obama is completely ineffective, this is simply not supported by fact, and the use of random polling statistics (please note that he does not use actual poll numbers, nor does he use comparative Republican/Democrat numbers, only arbitrary bits about 1953 and UFOs) is just a red herring.

Oh, and on the Virginia gubernatorial election, I'm not too well-informed, except that Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate, seems to be trying way too hard to convince me he's actually a Democrat, while Deeds is clearly very bad at campaigning. I mean, how can you lose an election when you're name is Creigh Deeds? That's got to be the best, most American cowboy name in history. Just imagine John Wayne riding up on a horse and saying "Howdy, ma'am. The name's Creigh Deeds." Making that into a commercial would have meant an instant win.


(This is a lot like the thing my family and I saw in South Carolina, which we also saw on the TV special in footage from Belgium. It's kind of a family joke, but also kind of creepy.)

Image from http://www.legjoints.com

Fear and Reading in Washington

I really don't understand why the Republicans harp so much on the length of a bill. Changing an entire healthcare system or creating a market for trade in an invisible commodity is not a simple task. If someone told me they were going to change the entire nature of one of the nation's largest industries, and then they pulled out a 10 page plan, I would laugh at them.

I have to wonder if in high school, between beatings based on his name, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was constantly saying to his English teacher, "Many of my classmates won't read this book. No one could possibly read this entire book. Then, when it comes time for the test, none of us will know what's in the book. The author should instead have written the book in 10 pages, so that we can read it, and so the entire class will understand it."

And during math class he probably looked at long equations and said "No one could possibly know what's in this equation," and then followed up with a request that equations be made simpler so everyone can get all the answers right, every time.

While the class may rather enjoy these suggestions (though many would still fail to read the shorter book or do the simplified equation), a good teacher would realize that this misses the point entirely. Congress's job is not to always do the easiest, simplest thing all the time. If a lot of Americans don't understand the entire bill, well, I would say that is the reason we have representative democracy. If a lot of Congressmen don't understand the full scope of a bill, then maybe they ought not be in Congress.

...


Follow up: Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked this question to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). Durbin asked, "what should be the page limit for restructuring a sixth of the economy?"

Alexander responded that the Congress should pass the changes in a series of smaller bills. This would seem like a sensible proposition, except that it isn't. It may come as a shock to many that a thousand two page bills is ultimately the same thing as one two thousand page bill, except that you've wasted unfathomable amounts of time debating and voting on every one of them. Maybe if we had an entire Congress dedicated to a single issue, we could do things this way, but as it stands, it just makes absolutely no sense.

So to provide an analogy, the Republicans want to do the equivalent of publishing an academic thesis through a series of Twitter posts.

(sarcasm)Yeah, that will be soooo much more understandable for everyone.(/sarcasm)

(Note, I've taken it upon myself to begin using a sarcasm html tag. We all know it's necessary)

Blunt: We can't have a public option because people will like it too much

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) just said something really stupid. I don't have the exact quote right now, but he discussed the idea of states being able to opt out of a public health insurance option. He said that no state would opt out of such a plan because it would deprive their citizens of the cheaper public health insurance. This, of course, would prompt one to ask why then we should be against having such an option.

He's basically saying "we can't let states decide whether or not to have this, because they will choose to have it since people will like it so much."

My brain hurts.

Health Warning

Let me warn you all:

Speaker Pelosi has unveiled the House Healthcare bill. Over the coming days, people on both sides of the aisle are going to flip their lids over this thing. You're going to hear all kinds of wild, baseless accusations about the evil of everyone, and every chucklehead in the media will be trying to convince us of one of two things:

  1. This bill is necessary for the continued existence of the human race on planet earth; or
  2. This bill will usher in an unimaginable reign of horror the likes of which we cannot even imagine.

For the record, neither of these is correct. Still, I'll back the bill, because it would be hard to make our healthcare system any worse than it already is.

McCain's Vendetta Against... Algae?

Okay, so I know I've already done this, but I promise this is the last time I'll bring it up. John McCain has selflessly combed through the Energy and Water Conference Report, presumably on the Department of the Interior appropriations bill, and has posted the "Top 10 pork barrel projects" from the report on his Twitter feed:


  1. $6 million for the Hawaii Renewable Energy Development Venture
  2. $2.25 million for the Montana Bio-Energy Center of Excellence in Montana
  3. $1.2 million for the Alternative Energy School of the Future in Nevada
  4. $2 million for the Algae Research in Washington
  5. $10 million for the Sustainable Energy Research Center in Mississippi
  6. $1.2 million for the Hydrogen Fuel Dispensing Station in West Virginia
  7. $1 million for the Alaska Climate Center in Alaska
  8. $1 million for the Performance Assessment Institute in Nevada
  9. $750,000 for the Algae to Ethanol Research and Evaluation in New Jersey
  10. $1 million for the New School Green Building in New York


That's great work there, Mr. McCain. You're really stickin' it to Big Algae.

Again, I ask: What, Mr. McCain, do you think is the point of an appropriations bill? What is the purpose of the Appropriations Committee, if not to appropriate money? Please tell me. Honestly, I can't figure it out.

Are you against these projects because they occur in various states and districts across the country, represented by specific Congressmen and Senators? Because there is only one place in the continential United States that has no vote in Congress, and that's Washington, DC, and there's just not enough room in DC for everything the federal government decides to do.

Bottom line, these all seem to me like worthy projects, and they have to happen somewhere. You're really just screwing the citizens of Arizona by refusing to participate, and you're being remarkably obtuse by acting like you're on some sacred mission to weed out corruption.

Confucius Say

House just approved this bill, 361 to 47:

H.RES.784
Title: Honoring the 2560th anniversary of the birth of Confucius and recognizing his invaluable contributions to philosophy and social and political thought.
Sponsor: Rep Green, Al [TX-9] (introduced 9/29/2009) Cosponsors (41)

While one might wonder why the Congress is voting on such a bill, the real question is why there are 47 Members of Congress who actively voted not to honor Confucius: 35 Republicans and 12 Democrats. Why do they hate Confucius?

To be honest, I'm just impressed that Al Green knows how old Confucius is.