2,000 Pages!?!?

Pelosi's new health care bill arrived yesterday - and it comes in at 2,000 pages. Any bill that long is guaranteed to be a compliance and enforcement nightmare that will dramatically increase bureaucracy, inefficiency and cost (pardon the redundancy). Does anyone really believe that health care can be made more effective and efficient through a bill that's 2,000 pages long?

Anyone in Congress or the media who comes out today in favor of this bill is revealing themselves to be an ideological kool-aid drinker. They cannot possibly have read the bill and judged it on its merits, so it's clear they'd be supporting it only because Obama, Pelosi and the special interest groups that actually wrote it told them to.

Democrats will say that anyone who opposes this bill is simply being obstructionist. But which is more logical and responsible - supporting legislation that hasn't been read (as the Democrats do), or NOT supporting legislation that hasn't been read?

If the real goal was improving health care (as opposed to the increased government control and social engineering that are clearly driving the Democrats' agenda), the legislation would be concise and targeted to the major issues needing improvement:

• portability of health insurance among employers and locations
• encouraging increased competition and reduced cost through the sale of health insurance policies across state lines
• equality of tax treatment of health insurance premiums regardless of where or from whom policies are purchased
• allowing the sale of policies customized to buyers' needs rather than mandating one-size fits all policies that make people pay for coverage they'll never need.

These are simple concepts and each could be documented clearly in just a few pages. Even if each took 10 pages to outline you'd have only a 40 page bill. But the House version is 2,000 and the Senate version is currently over 1,500 pages.

Congress doesn't read bills before passing them, and we know they didn't write this themselves. Bills this long simply create the impression that Obama and Congress have told their favorite special interest groups to load up the legislation with whatever they want. And they're hoping to rush it through before we catch on.