Well, the long-awaited health care bill from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was made available for public inspection this week.
HR 3962 is staggering. It's unbelievably staggering. It creates a level of government bureaucracy hitherto unknown to all living things.
It's not that everything in it is a bad idea. There are just way, way too many ideas - good or bad.
I mean, one part takes a poke a vending machines.
The bill - I'm not making this up - would require that vending machine operators either create new machines that allow customers to view nutrition facts or post nutritional information for each product near "each article of food or the selection button."
I'm dead serious.
Section 2572, p 1,515: "In the case of an article of food sold from a vending machine that - (I) does not permit a prospective purchaser to examine the Nutritional Facts Panel before purchasing the article or does not otherwise provide visible nutrition information at the point of purchase; and (II) is operated by a person who is engaged in the business of owning or operating 20 or more vending machines, the vending machine operator shall provide a sign in close proximity to each article of food or the selection button that includes a clear and conspicuous statement disclosing the number of calories contained in the article."
All the stuff in the vending machine is labeled, but Pelosi and friends figured you need to be informed before you push the button corresponding with the Twinkies.
But honestly, aside from costing vending machine operators tens of millions of dollars to implement, what exactly will this provision accomplish?
Nothing.
That's because when you're standing in front of a vending machine and you are confronted with a choice between the Munchos or the Doritos, the nutrition facts are irrelevant. Everybody knows chips and candy bars are a nutritional train wreck. We don't eat them because they're good for us. We eat them because they're tasty.
And this is only one, tiny, insignificant useless part of this excessive, vexatious, government hemorrhage.
The House Republican Conference plodded though the bill and compiled a list of all the boards, committees, bureaucracies and programs contained in the bill.
There are 111 of them. I was going to list them all, but even reducing the point size to 8 and changing the font to Helvetica, it would have wiped out almost all of page 2A. It truly is unbelievable.
Here's a sampling of 20. Remember, there are 91 more.
Retiree Reserve Trust Fund (Section 111(d), p. 61)
Grant program for State health access programs (Section 114, p. 72)
Health Benefits Advisory Committee (Section 223, p. 111)
Health Choices Administration (Section 241, p. 131)
Qualified Health Benefits Plan Ombudsman (Section 244, p. 138)
Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund (Section 307, p. 195)
State-based Health Insurance Exchanges (Section 308, p. 197)
Grant program for health insurance cooperatives (Section 310, p. 206)
"Public Health Insurance Option" (Section 321, p. 211)
Telehealth Advisory Committee (Section 1191 (b), p. 589)
Demonstration program providing reimbursement for "culturally and linguistically appropriate services" (Section 1222, p. 617)
Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (Section 2562, p. 1494)
Intergovernmental Task Force on Indian environmental and nuclear hazards (Section 3101, p. 1754)
University centers for excellence in developmental disabilities education (Section 2527(b), p. 1410)
Grant program to implement medication therapy management services (Section 2528, p. 1412)
Grant program to promote positive health behaviors in underserved communities (Section 2530, p. 1422)
Demonstration program for shared decision making using patient decision aids (Section 1236, p. 648)
Grant program to implement medication therapy management services (Section 2528, p. 1412)
Accountable Care Organization pilot program under Medicare (Section 1301, p. 653)
26.Patient ombudsman for comparative effectiveness research (Section 1401(a), p. 753)To say that this piece of legislation is an overreach is akin to saying that a man about to be struck by a tsunami might experience moisture.
There is good news, however. The bill won't pass in its present form. And even after it's been watered down, it will have to be reconciled with the Senate bill.
So lawmakers have a long, long way to go and hopefully a little common sense will prevail.
It bothers me that the things I think are important to bringing down health care costs - expanded health savings accounts and tort reform aren't really addressed.
But most troubling of all is that I have less confidence in the US government now than ever before.
This is precisely the moment in history when lawmakers should be trying to limit themselves, do more with less, bring down the deficit and leave more money in the private sector.
There already are huge entitlement programs teetering on the brink of insolvency.
Yet what are lawmakers doing? Crafting the largest government entitlement in US history.
