"Obamacare": What Is in It (Barack Obama's Health Care Reform‪)‬

House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said at the 2010 legislative conference for the National Association of Counties on March 9: "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." Before the bill's passage, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said: "I love these members, they get up and say, 'read the bill.' What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages long and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?" In fact, it took much longer than two days, more like a week, just to skim through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("the Act") as passed into law, which is 906 pages long in single-spaced statutory format. It would also take a whole team of lawyers just to look up the citations to previous laws. Since the Act passed, tax accountants, insurance actuaries, and others have been attempting to translate its provisions into numbers that affect their industries. Most importantly, it is actually impossible to know the ultimate impact: this is an enabling act that sets up the infrastructure for later implementation by some 159 new bureaucracies. The all-important details are not in the Act itself, but will be created by administrative agencies, insulated from the controversies in the political process--and from accountability at the ballot box.