Some tough reading

Re: Health care bills before U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

One really has to want to read the current “affordable health care” bill known as HR 3962. It is 1,999 pages in length.

However, whenever I see on TV the bill stacked in three or four packages with a rubber band around each pile of papers, that is perhaps very misleading to the American public.

If you looks at the bill at http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf on the Internet, each page is not only numbered at the top of the page but each line is also numbered.

For example, page 4 has 25 numbered lines with anywhere from one word to eight words per numbered line. Page 9 also has 25 numbered lines with one to nine words per line.

The bill is written as a legal document because it will be inserted in the U.S. Code (laws of the United States) if and when it becomes a law. Many references are inserted in the bill concerning other laws that the bill will change, amend or define terms.

It is not in the format of a long story, book, or research paper.

Even more difficult is the appropriate committee reports issued by several committees in the House of Representatives. Those documents are not available online as near as I can tell. But all committee reports will be available at registered government document depositories. As well, the inserted copies in the Congressional Record is also more difficult to read because of the tiny print as in the committee reports.

This letter was written Nov. 6. Only the future will tell the final version as HR 3962 is the melding of various House committees’ labors and then there is the Senate version.

The Senate version of 1,502 pages is available online at http://finance.senate.gov/sitepages/leg/LEG%202009/101909%20America%27s%20Healthy%20Future%20Act%20Legislative%20Language.pdf.

And the Senate Finance Committee report is online at http://finance.senate.gov/press/Bpress/2009press/prb102109a.pdf.