Is 'Obamacare' really that long?

christiefan915

christiefan915

Catalyst
You cons are just so easy. Give us a challenge, for once. :D

...More than two years after it was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama, critics still frequently note that Obamacare is 2,400 (sometimes it’s stated as 2,700) pages long -- the implication being that it’s overly complex and that lawmakers could not possibly have read it (and therefore understood it) before they voted on it. The 2,400 figure is included often in letters to the editor, blogs, newspaper articles and even on the website of Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama’s Republican challenger.

Two-thousand, four-hundred pages. Wow! That’s a lot of paper! It’s a good thing that, thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to track down or print out a hard copy of the bill to double-check the claims made about it. All I had to do was Google “Affordable Care Act” to learn that the document is official known as Public Law 111-148. A visit to the U.S. Government Printing Office website (gpo.gov) yields a page with PDF and text versions of the law. A quick click on the PDF link opens up all 2,400 pages of the law on my computer.

Oops! Make that all 906 pages of the law. You read that correctly: The law, as enacted, is 906 pages long. (Click here to check it out.) That’s still really, really long, but it brings the law down from insanely large to sometime almost manageable. It’s hard to imagine anyone reading a 2,400-page document, but 906 pages puts the law in the realm of some of Stephen King’s longer novels. (And, for Republicans, “Obamacare” is just as frightening.)

To double-check the 906-page figure, I visited the Obama administration’s website for the law, HealthCare.gov. Clicking on the “Full Text of the Affordable Care Act” link yields a 974-page PDF. The 68-page discrepancy puzzled me, until I read the full title at the top of the document, which noted that it included “Health-Related Portions Of The Health Care And Education Reconciliation Act Of 2010.” As you may recall, the Democrats’ loss of a supermajority in the Senate in early 2010 led to parliamentary gymnastics to pass an amended version of the bill in a way that avoided a Republican filibuster; this was done through the so-called “reconciliation” process, which limits debate on spending bills. As far as I can tell, including this reconciliation act makes the document a bit longer...

...I was curious to know how the length of the Affordable Care Act compared with other major pieces of legislation. Take, for example, the Wisconsin state budget (officially known as Act 32) signed into law last July by Gov. Scott Walker. The PDF of the budget, as approved, is 532 pages long. I cut and pasted the text into my word processor, and learned the budget ran to 409,629 words (give or take -- the figure includes some page headers and other extraneous verbiage). How long is the Affordable Care Act? By my count, it’s 418,779 words (again, that’s approximate).

In other words (pardon the pun), a law refashioning one of the major sectors of the U.S. economy is only slightly longer than a law setting the two-year budget for one of the 50 states.

So, ultimately, how long is 906 pages? Yes, it’s really, really long. But is it unreasonably long, considering the issue involved? That’s up to readers -- and voters -- to decide for themselves.

http://www.leadertelegram.com/blogs/tom_giffey/article_c9f1fa54-d041-11e1-9d01-0019bb2963f4.html
 
christiefan915 said:
According to him, 70 pages. So let's do the math. One state (MA) = 70 pages. Using this number for all states, fifty states = ? pages.

a. 350 pages
b. 3,500 pages
c. 3.5 to the 10th power pages
d. all of the above
e. none of the above
Click to expand...

Is that the same math you used when you said "you cons" but actually just meant Taft?
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...1eec914-bcf9-11e2-9b09-1638acc3942e_blog.html

The Facts


The process the McConnell folks used is fairly simple. They went to the Web site for the Federal Register and searched for “Affordable Care Act,” the official name for the health-care law. That turned up 897 documents.

On the Web site, there’s a button that will download the documents to an Excel spreadsheet (CVS/excel). Then you use the sum feature on Excel to add up the pages and presto, you end with 20,202 pages. These were then printed out and duly stacked in a pile.

“Some of these may only relate to ‘Obamacare’ (rather than being entirely on ‘Obamacare’), but since they’re related, they’re part of the regulatory structure,” said Don Stewart, McConnell’s spokesman.

Regular readers know that we frown on such page-counting exercises, since we’re not sure what it really tells you. In the case of the health-care law, businesses actually have been seeking detailed regulations so they know exactly what to expect. And using the same methods used by the McConnell team, we found tens of thousands of pages of regulations for Medicare Advantage and the prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D), which were pushed by Republicans.

Stewart countered that it would be fairer to count only the regs issued 1,148 days after the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 was enacted, since it’s exactly that long since the Affordable Care Act became law. By his count, that yields about 5,000 pages of regulations, or roughly one-quarter of the number for Obamacare.

There’s another wrinkle, too. The documents that turn up are both final rules and proposed rules, as well as “notices” (such as for new funding or committee meetings) and “presidential documents” (mostly news releases). But the proposed rules are often similar to the final rules, except that the final rules include pages of public comments. Looking just at rules, you end up with just 9,625 pages, while proposed rules amount to 7,432 pages.

One could argue that this amounts to double counting, since the final regulations, not the proposed rules, are what matters to business. Stewart begs to differ: “If you’re affected by the regulations, you have to know and understand the proposed rule so you can comment on it, and you have to know the actual rule because you have to try and live with it.”

In any case, note how McConnell referred to “rules and regulations already associated with this law.” In this way, he neatly sidesteps the question of whether he is referring just to the final regulations.

Moreover, all of these rules, proposed rules, notices and the like are listed on the administration’s Health Reform page on the Federal Register Web site.

Stewart pointed out that McConnell’s office counted only Federal Register pages, which are typed in such tiny type that each page is worth almost four pages with regular, double-spaced type. By that logic, 10,000 pages of final rules could be labeled as 40,000 pages. “So if anything, we’re undercounting,” he said.

An administration official said most of the rules related to the implementation of the law are complete but there are still rules that have not been finalized or issued. “We will continue to issue guidance and rules from time to time to respond to stakeholder questions or respond to guidance,” the official said.
Click to expand...
 
Don't give her strawman any more thought, Taft.

I don't know anyone whose objection to Obamacare is the number of pages the GPO assigned to it.

It's more likely that Christie hasn't ever read it...and she's not alone.

 
Big money said:
Don't give her strawman any more thought, Taft.

I don't know anyone whose objection to Obamacare is the number of pages the GPO assigned to it.

It's more likely that Christie hasn't ever read it...and she's not alone.
Click to expand...

Not to worry, I have no intention of engaging Mr. Daft at any time.

However, you should note that these were all taken from RW sites, and there are plenty more where they came from.

The Obamacare Law Was Thousands of Pages So that No One Would Know What Was In It
Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/09/obamacare-law-thousands-pages-one-know/#QUQJRtOYU5j9BJZc.99



​
 
christiefan915 said:
You cons are just so easy. Give us a challenge, for once. :D

...More than two years after it was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama, critics still frequently note that Obamacare is 2,400 (sometimes it’s stated as 2,700) pages long -- the implication being that it’s overly complex and that lawmakers could not possibly have read it (and therefore understood it) before they voted on it. The 2,400 figure is included often in letters to the editor, blogs, newspaper articles and even on the website of Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama’s Republican challenger.

Two-thousand, four-hundred pages. Wow! That’s a lot of paper! It’s a good thing that, thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to track down or print out a hard copy of the bill to double-check the claims made about it. All I had to do was Google “Affordable Care Act” to learn that the document is official known as Public Law 111-148. A visit to the U.S. Government Printing Office website (gpo.gov) yields a page with PDF and text versions of the law. A quick click on the PDF link opens up all 2,400 pages of the law on my computer.

Oops! Make that all 906 pages of the law. You read that correctly: The law, as enacted, is 906 pages long. (Click here to check it out.) That’s still really, really long, but it brings the law down from insanely large to sometime almost manageable. It’s hard to imagine anyone reading a 2,400-page document, but 906 pages puts the law in the realm of some of Stephen King’s longer novels. (And, for Republicans, “Obamacare” is just as frightening.)

To double-check the 906-page figure, I visited the Obama administration’s website for the law, HealthCare.gov. Clicking on the “Full Text of the Affordable Care Act” link yields a 974-page PDF. The 68-page discrepancy puzzled me, until I read the full title at the top of the document, which noted that it included “Health-Related Portions Of The Health Care And Education Reconciliation Act Of 2010.” As you may recall, the Democrats’ loss of a supermajority in the Senate in early 2010 led to parliamentary gymnastics to pass an amended version of the bill in a way that avoided a Republican filibuster; this was done through the so-called “reconciliation” process, which limits debate on spending bills. As far as I can tell, including this reconciliation act makes the document a bit longer...

...I was curious to know how the length of the Affordable Care Act compared with other major pieces of legislation. Take, for example, the Wisconsin state budget (officially known as Act 32) signed into law last July by Gov. Scott Walker. The PDF of the budget, as approved, is 532 pages long. I cut and pasted the text into my word processor, and learned the budget ran to 409,629 words (give or take -- the figure includes some page headers and other extraneous verbiage). How long is the Affordable Care Act? By my count, it’s 418,779 words (again, that’s approximate).

In other words (pardon the pun), a law refashioning one of the major sectors of the U.S. economy is only slightly longer than a law setting the two-year budget for one of the 50 states.

So, ultimately, how long is 906 pages? Yes, it’s really, really long. But is it unreasonably long, considering the issue involved? That’s up to readers -- and voters -- to decide for themselves.

http://www.leadertelegram.com/blogs/tom_giffey/article_c9f1fa54-d041-11e1-9d01-0019bb2963f4.html
Click to expand...
USA Today says there are 11,000 pages of regulations, christiecommunistfan.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/10/23/affordable-care-act-pages-long/3174499/

Don't you shills realize that it doesn't matter how you present a pile of shit, because it's still a pile of shit?

Go log back on to healthcare.gov and continue drooling. ;)
 
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