SPIN METER: Republicans lying about the size of the health bill

[steven johnson]

Harry Reid's healthcare bill is 209 pages. Republicans regularly pile the House and Senate bills together claiming that it represents government gone amok. It is really Republican spin gone amok.

The actual bill, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced last week, came in at 2,074 double-spaced pages, 84 more pages than the House version, which was already being ridiculed for its size.

Sen. Orrin Hatch claimed that the Senate bill was larger than Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.' It is not. Leo Tolstoy's tome is longer than either bill -- nearly twice as long.

The bill passed by the House is 319,145 words. The Senate bill is 318,512 words, shorter than the House version despite consuming more paper. Various versions of Tolstoy's novel are 560,000 to 670,000 words. Bush's education act tallied more than 280,000 words.

So what we have is more Republican lies and distortions to ill serve the body politic.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 24, 2009
Filed at 2:41 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republicans love to get their hands on the Democrats' health care legislation. They show it to the cameras at every opportunity, even piling one version on top of another to make a big pile look even bigger.

Although they complain they don't have time to read all of it, they found the time to tape it together, page by page, so they could roll it up the steps of the Capitol like super-sized toilet paper and show how very long it is.

No one really expects brevity when reinventing something as complex and huge as the nation's health insurance system, which accounts for one-sixth of the economy. Indeed, legislation of comparable size was used to redefine an area of much more limited federal responsibility, education. That was the No Child Left Behind Act from the agenda of Republican President George W. Bush.

Size only matters in the health care debate because Republicans have turned the length of the legislation into a symbol: Big, unwieldy bill means big, overreaching government. Even bigger when you display double-spaced copies with double-wide margins and large print.

SPIN METER: Legislation Inflation Grips GOP

[emulatorloo]

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