Why "2,700 pages" rings hollow

Anyone paying close enough attention to the health care debate has heard the Republican leadership reminding people that the health reform bill is 2,700 pages long. And Democrats have largely failed to find a counter-message that works. People are wary of ambitious undertakings that seem complicated and expensive and, most of all, that they don't understand.

But it got me wondering: just how long was the bill that enacted Medicare Part D? This is a prescription drug benefit program for seniors, much maligned by democrats as a handout to the private insurance companies that administer the benefit. The answer is that H.R. 1, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, takes up four hundred and fifteen pages.

Read the text of that bill here.

So, it took 415 pages to create a new Medicare Part D Program. At ~2,700 pages, that would make the Senate bill about 6.5 times longer. And yet, look at what's in there:

-Expanded coverage, including 30 Million more people on health care rolls
-Eliminates discrimination based on pre-existing conditions
-Eliminates wasteful spending from Medicare
-Establishes health insurance exchanges
-Closes the Medicare "donut hole"
-Eliminates lifetime caps on coverage
-Prevents people from getting dropped when they get sick
-Requires a high proportion of your premiums to be spent on care, not profits

Let's look at it another way. Medicare part D had about 24 million participants in 2007. That means about 57,831 people per page of legislation. Now, let's assume that with a population of 300,000,000, about 275 million would be required to have insurance under the Senate bill. That means that citizens would see benefits from this legislation at a ratio of, wait for it... more than 105,000 beneficiaries per legislative page. You could say that this is just the size of the effect, that not all of these people will "benefit" from the legislation...but I don't buy that for a second. I'd say that 2,700 is pretty economical for all that the Senate bill provides.

Of course, this is a little bit of a trip down the rabbit hole, because the GOP accusations about the length of the bill have never been good faith objections. They really just fit in there with the death panels argument, which started as a Republican idea in the first place. Nonetheless, this has been a fun little exercise.