One of the many talking points of those opposed to the current health care bill has to do with the size of the proposed legislation, Senate bill, H.R. 3590, aka the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  A standard ritual for opponents of health care reform is to drag out a printed version of the bill, which comes in at a hefty 2,409 pages.

All those pages make for a pretty imposing stack of paper, as opponents are sure to illustrate.  At the recent health care summit, I noticed several copies of the bill were on prominent display, mysterious white towers of paper posing ominously for the cameras.  When trying to imagine what’s contained in all that paper, I think most of us have an image of 2,409 pages crammed with impossibly fine print full of impossibly complicated double-speak.

Today I downloaded the PDF version of the bill.  It is indeed 2,409 pages, but what I immediately noticed is that the bill is not crammed full of tiny incoherent bureaucratic jibberish.  It is mostly crammed with white space.  In fact, pages are exactly 24 or 25 lines long with overly wide margins.  Each line is numbered, and the entire document is heavily outlined and indented.  There’s acres of spare space in this document for bored staffers to doodle on.   If anything, the travesty of health care reform is the enormous amount of taxpayer money wasted on empty paper.

That got me to thinking.  How big is this document when formatted for normal people like you and me?  I was able to locate a text version of the document and imported it into OpenOffice Writer (similar to Microsoft Word).  I set the margins at 1/2″ inch and the font to 9 point Courier.  This is an efficient but very readable format that I frequently use when generating work-related documents.  I did not eliminate any white space or change the text/layout in any way.  What I ended up with was a document of 888 pages, or roughly one third the page count of the 2,409 pages of the PDF version.  That’s still a lot of document, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as the towers of paper I’ve been seeing all over the media.

Next, I wanted to compare the current health care bill to some similar piece of recent legislation to see how it compares in size.  What I found was the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (Medicare Part D).  This is a good comparison, as Medicare Part D was written by a Republican congress and approved by a Republican president, while the current health care bill was written by a Democratic congress for a Democratic president.  I did a word count on both documents.  Medicare Part D (176,474 words) has a word count that is 46% (approximately one half) of the current health care bill’s word count (379,639 words).  That’s a significant difference in size.  However, when considering the vastly broader scope of the health care bill, the additional verbiage doesn’t seem to be relevant at all.  I think it is safe to say that our nation’s current health care issues are many times more complicated than the problems tackled by Medicare Part D.  If passed into law, the current health care legislation will impact Americans of all ages, whereas Medicare Part D only impacts Americans on Medicare (generally 65 and older).  Simply based on the problems addressed and the population affected, the scope of this bill is easily twice as large as the scope of Medicare Part D.

So what’s the point of my admittedly silly analysis?  I’m not really sure.  I didn’t download the health care bill for the purpose of evaluating it’s size.  I’m much more interested in it’s content and the impact it would have on me and my fellow citizens.  However, the first thing that struck me was that this bill is not as textually big as opponents claim,  nor as intimidating as it’s page count would indicate.  When set to a more realistic and efficient format, the page count drops dramatically from 2,409 pages to 888 pages.  When measured word for word against a similar document (Medicare Part D), the health care bill is a little more than twice as big.  When adjusted for scope, the health care bill is no more excessive than Medicare Part D legislation.

Just like the old saying “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover”, it’s important not to judge the current health bill on it’s size alone.  Those who are trying to invalidate the current health care bill based solely on the physical size of the document are judging the cover while ignoring the actual content.