Obama and HR 3590 for some light reading.

I have been critical of the Obama health care legislation like many people. The legislation is Obama-care, as it is usually called. The truth is I know few details about the legislation except what is reported in the media. So tonight, I decided to read the bill. After a while, I felt lost like the buffalo.

It is HR 3590. And it is, according to my PDF page counter program, 2409 pages long. After searching through 20 pages of a tinyish printed index, I went directly to Title IX, page 1904, Revenue Offset Provisions. I am not absolutely sure, but it seemed this section was going to explain how the bill's cost was going to be financed.

However, after reading this section, or trying to read this section, I am sure of one thing, the tax preparers and litigators have additional job security in HR 3590. It is obtuse. The situational irony for me was reading the blurry section describing the legislation transparency program. I suspect a person with a law degree, advanced education in syntax construction and significant experience in Boolean algebra could make sense of the legislative language. Boolean algebra is required because of the many sets, subsets, inclusions, exclusions, conjunctions, disjunctions, derivations, axiomatization, negations, exceptions, and if-then conditional logic statements that permeate the legislation. Am I kidding? No! Take a Google look at HR 3590 and have some Advil handy..

I am not suggesting the HR 3590 is bad because it is difficult to understand. Why? Because I sense most legislation is difficult to understand. I am suggesting, however, that part of the conspicuously confusing and politically polarizing debate over the legislation is created by the sheer difficulty in interpreting what the bill means and its genuine impact on the delivery of and the financing of medical care to Americans.

I wonder how many congress persons  have actually read this legislation? Maybe a few. But then the number, who understand it, must be a significantly smaller percentage.

There was one section that explained the excise tax on businesses. I gave up understanding how to compute this excise tax. There was another section describing a tax on medical devices. I gave up on calculating the medical device fee too.

In fact, I just gave up. I will read some more tomorrow.

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