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Posted by: amazed 1 month, 3 weeks ago

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amazed1 month, 3 weeks ago

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My representative in Congress should be reading the damn bills THEMSELVES!!! Neither I, nor anyone else in my district voted for any of my representatives' staff members. Why on earth should I be paying a Congressperson $170+ thousand dollars per year to have some assistant interpret their job for them. In that case, we should just elect the assistant.

You are correct that laws are ridiculously complicated with the purpose taking several dozen pages and the definitions taking even more pages. Then the bill (any bill) continually refers back to other bill until it is such a maze that it is nearly indecipherable, Why? Because we have mostly lawyers running Congress and they like it that way because if no one can really say what the language of the bill means, the lawyers and the judges can make it say anything they want.

Your touting of how wonderful this bill is because it does so much more htna just "change how insurance is sold and add regulations" is my contention of what is wrong with this legislation and all of our legislation.

Bills should be one topic and one topic only. If you cannot state the purpose of the bill in a page or two, it definitely should be more than one bill because it's trying to do to much.

The only reason that we do not make our laws this way is because "it's always been done this way" and single topic bills would eliminate at least 98% of the useless pork involved.

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  Beau78901 month, 3 weeks ago
  
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  Then you'd better hope that the representative you voted into Congress is not too lazy to read the bill him- or herself.
  
  The bills would be even longer tan they are if they simply repealed previous laws and then wrote entirely new ones, and there'd be new loopholes that have taken decades to discover and close. That's why they refer back and forth to others. Even the Republican plan this article is about is only a set of amendments to the Democratic plan--it constantly refers to that plan and would have to be way bigger than even the Democratic plan to stand on its own.
  
  That's not about any problem with the legislators. If it's a problem, it's because the legal process requires that everything be meticulously spelled out. These are laws--they have to stand up to the Supreme Court's determination that they are clear on all forseeable questions or they'll be overturned as too vague.
  
  Sorry, that's the way the system works.
  
  The bill is not supposed to be about insurance reform only. It is supposed to cut costs and give more people affordable access. Everything that's in the bill is related to those goals. I'd be willing to bet you couldn't find an example of entirely "useless pork"--that is, appropriations of funds that are unrelated to the two goals I mentioned above-- in all 1,990 pages of H.R. 3962 as written today. Feel free to take a look:
  
  http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf
  
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