Esther de Waal writes, “Who knows the secrets of the world? Not the learned men, but the poets.” I note that she didn’t include lawmakers in the possible answers. And yet America’s lawmakers act as though not only do they and they alone know the secrets of economics, health care, and all other matters of public policy, they also feel duty-bound to codify their wisdom in laws thousands of pages long, encrypted with legal language only a “learned person” can understand.
The health care reform bills currently before the Congress are some 2,000 pages long each. The reconciled bill, if it comes to that, certainly will be longer than either the House or Senate version. This one bill – one act of law – contains more words than the Ten Commandments, the Code of Hammurabi, Magna Carta, The Mayflower Compact, and The United States Constitution combined.
