Saket Vora

Henry Waxman (D-CA) appeared on a great episode of the  The Daily Show last night, where Jon Stewart brought up the two major bills that Waxman has worked on in these past few months — H.R. 2454 (the energy bill) and H.R. 3200 (the health care reform bill). Waxman is the current Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, so both these bills fall under his jurisdiction.

Stewart brought up multiple times how massive these bills have become — over a thousand pages. When Waxman tried to explain the goals of the health care reform, Stewart said “well when you put it like that, it sounds so straightforward. Why does it take a 1000 pages to do that?” Waxman gamely tried to explain all the nitty gritty details that make things more complicated — addressing rural clinic concerns, teaching hospital needs that are big in urban centers, insurance regulatory changes, etc.

Being a sort of typography nerd, I recalled that the formatting for legislative bills isn’t like that of typical reports and papers that most of us are familiar with. The margins are very wide, double spaced, font is larger than 12pt. Let me show some example pages from the health care form bill:

^ Here is pretty common looking page (pg. 629)

^ Section titles can take up a lot of space (pg. 194)

^ and sometimes whole pages are indented. (pg. 604)

So I did some number crunching. I threw all my old Technician newspaper columns into Word, removed all paragraph breaks and titles, 12pt. Times New Roman double-spaced and came out to be 342 words/page. I took some representative samples of reports with natural paragraph breaks and section titles, also 12pt. Times New Roman double-spaced, and got between 270 and 300 words/page. Online you’ll find that an average book has between 200 and 250 words/page. I even went and compiled some quick and dirty statistics on the Harry Potter books, which average 255 words/page [no, I didn't control for publishing format, just wanted some quick numbers].

For H.R. 3200, I went and found the number of words per page for 20 random pages throughout the bill. The numbers ranged from 104 word/page to 215 words/page, for an average of about 159 words/page for the 1,036 page health care bill.

If we take these figures for more commonly found page formatting (342, 300, 270, 255, 250 words/page) and translate that to the health care bill, we’d have a bill that is between 485 pages to 663 pages, for an average length of 592 pages.

The last five books in the Harry Potter series have page lengths of roughly 448, 752, 870, 652, and 784. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel hardcover clocks in at 512 pages. War and Peace is over 1200. Atlas Shrugged is about 1200 pages too.

Legislative bills aren’t like speeches or interviews, where you can just emphasize convenient 30 second sound bites. This is actual lawmaking, where you have to contend with decades of existing laws, codes, acts. Look at just a few lines of the bill:

SEC. 1201. IMPROVING ASSETS TESTS FOR MEDICARE SAVINGS PROGRAM AND LOW-INCOME SUBSIDY PROGRAM.
(a) APPLICATION OF HIGHEST LEVEL PERMITTED UNDER LIS TO ALL SUBSIDY ELIGIBLE INDIVIDUALS.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—Section 1860D–14(a)(1) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w 114(a)(1)) is amended in the matter before subparagraph (A), by inserting ‘‘(or, beginning with 2012,
paragraph (3)(E))’’ after ‘‘paragraph (3)(D)’’.
(2) ANNUAL INCREASE IN LIS RESOURCE TEST.—Section 1860D–14(a)(3)(E)(i) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 1395w–114(a)(3)(E)(i)) is amended….

So let’s cut down on this “oh come on, a  1000 page bill!” obsession and instead demand that our congressional representatives do the often difficult task of governing that they signed up for and we elected them to do.