re: #76 Fat Bastard Vegetarian

So he has little room to bitch at a citizen for not reading the bill. IMO.

In the end, Congressmen certainly need to be reading the bills they’re voting on; that’s their job, after all, and it’s expected.

Citizens opposed to the bills, on the other hand, may base their opposition in one of a couple of places. On the one hand, as this Congressman is insisting, there may be specific points contained in the bill that are objectionable. But on the other, it is entirely possible to be opposed to the very idea of the bill itself, regardless of the specifics it contains.

In this particular case, it is perfectly reasonable to be opposed to the notion of government-run health care of any kind. The traditional role of government’s interaction with the private sector has been one of regulation and imposition of penalties. It is difficult to find a precedent for government takeover of a portion of the private sector, which is what this measure seeks in it’s present form. And it is entirely possible for the government to achieve most or all of it’s stated ends - slower growth in medical costs, more competition among insurers, even a shift away from employer-based health care provision - through the mechanisms of regulation. It doesn’t required the government to actually run the health care system.

This is a valid position to take - that government imposition of the management of health care is both unprecedented and fraught with uncertainty. I’ll grant that the Congressman is correct to chastise those present simply to bleat for not even knowing what they’re bleating about, but it certainly isn’t a requirement that they possess encyclopedic knowledge of the contents of a bill if they feel the bill itself shouldn’t be debated in the first place.