Late Night Reading

I had trouble getting to sleep recently. I didn’t have a good book to read, so I went to the next best thing, something everybody is talking about these days anyway. I decided to read HR 3200, the proposed Healthcare Reform bill in the House of Representatives.

Now, if you want to read something that is sure to put you to sleep, this is it! It has more plot twists than “Anna Karenina,” “Dr. Zhivago,” or “War and Peace.” It is also longer than any of those three classics.

What’s more, it is written in some foreign language that nobody seems to understand, since there are so many different translations of it. And people seem to get really, really angry about that, and they keep shouting at each other.

I guess everyone thinks that the louder they yell, the more likely they’ll be understood.

Anyway, I started this long and boring text and before I got two pages into it, I was already lost. But I kept on reading as best I could, and then I got to a really interesting phrase up on pages 50 and 51. Here it is:
SEC. 152. PROHIBITING DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH CARE.
(a) IN GENERAL. Except as otherwise explicitly permitted by this Act and by subsequent regulations consistent with this Act, all health care and related services (including insurance coverage and public health activities) covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.

Did you understand that??? Do you know what the phrase “personal characteristics” means??? Do you realize that “this Act” was repeated THREE TIMES in that one sentence???

Geez Louise, is that convoluted, or what? No wonder nobody in Congress wants to read those 1017 pages of weirdness. I’m still trying to figure out what “extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services” means.

Doesn’t “extraneous” usually mean “not pertinent, or irrelevant?” Oh wait! There is a second definition in my dictionary. Now get this: “Coming from outside; foreign.”

So, everything before the word “extraneous” is either irrelevant or not pertinent, or else THIS IS THAT MAGIC WORD THAT SAYS ILLEGALS WILL BE COVERED BY THE BILL. OMG, I just uncovered the secret plot!!!

Well, after that discovery, I had little chance of getting to sleep that night, so I read the rest of the bill and found zillions of other indeterminate phrases and words. “Personal characteristics” is repeated numerous times. And, by the way, the butler did it. Well, at the White House they call him the "Chief of Staff."

I came to the conclusion that whoever wrote that horrible piece of prose must have been a William F. Buckley (RIP) wannabe. (No, the late William F. Buckley wasn’t a Republican from Ipanema, I meant Rest In Peace)

I think the writer(s) failed. It’s no wonder people are screaming at each other.


(I have to include this disclaimer: Please try to see the humor in the above piece and for gosh sakes, laugh a little. There is plenty of time for crying later on.)