VIRGINIA BEACH
Kriss McLaughlin thinks members of Congress would have a better understanding of health care reform if they read the legislation being debated.
She knows how full of jargon and complicated it is – on Saturday she read aloud more than 75 pages of one of the proposals.
“They should read it themselves,” said McLaughlin, a member of the Tidewater Libertarian Party. “If it’s too long, then they should chunk it up into smaller pieces that they can consider. They have to know what they’re voting on.”
A group of mainly libertarians and conservatives calling itself Americans for Individual Liberties gathered at 8 a.m. Saturday at Atlanta Bread Co. near Lynnhaven Mall to begin reading. Their point was to send a message that H.R. 3200 is incomprehensible to the average person.
All readers agreed: Nothing they read made sense, said Robert K. Dean, who helped organize the reading.
At one point on Saturday, videos were being recorded of people reading at seven different laptop computers, he said.
“The legalese is just mindboggling in this thing,” he said.
By late afternoon, more than 600 pages of the 1,018-page bill had been read and recorded. The rest will be finished soon, Dean said.
A 10-minute video with clips of the event will be loaded to YouTube. All the video will be posted at www.ifaq.us.
“We want to illustrate just how bad the bill itself is,” said Rick Caldwell, who maintains the Web site.
But aside from someone’s views on the proposals for health care reform, he said, people should at least agree that the legislation should be understandable.
“I had no clue what I was reading, this thing is so bad,” he said. “It should be readable to me.”
Patrick Wilson, (757) 446-2957, patrick.wilson@pilotonline.com
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Well golly gee wizz Mike.
Well golly gee wizz Mike. Perhaps you can read HB3200 and explain in the greatest of detail what it all means. Since you seem to know all there is to know about everything while assuming the rest of us have the brains of a pencil eraser. You seem to be an expert on transportation issues, commercial developement, and now you have this hidden talent that you are an expert on government health care, and HB3200 too. WOW. Why not just tell Rep. Glenn Nye to vacate his office and you take his place. Perhaps you can get the HR Transportation Organization, HR Chambers of Commerce, and The SPSA board together and you all can hold a town hall and explain it to us and back it up with page, section, and paragraph of HB3200. Let us know when you're ready. I will be patiently waiting.
health reform
is not a bad idea. What congress is doing is. Like the sign asks,
If Pro is the opposite of Con, does that mean Congress is the opposite of Progress?
Most law is easy to understand
Most law is easy to understand. It's the government elitist "people are stupid and must have their lives run by us" that are short in the comprehension department. Just pick some stuff randomly, and you'll find it's not hard to get the meaning:
http://leg1.state.va.us/
Hmmmm
"I have wondered at times about what
the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them
through the U.S. Congress." - Ronald Reagan
Uugh....grunt...me not
Uugh....grunt...me not understand...bill must be bad...Hulk smash!
Healthcare Bill
The average citizen may not need to understand all legislation, but they must be able to understand the healthcare bill to know what they are intitled to. The Medicare book and other health policies I have had over the years are written in plain language and can be understood by most readers. I tried to read the healthcare bill and it's just not understandable. My guess is that the politicians don't want us to understand it.
The real problem
Is that the congressmen do not read the bills in their entirety. Having been a legal copy editor for 6 years myself, I know that reading and understand legalese is not something an average person has the training or education to do. That's why people go to law school; however, the fact is that many congressmen themselves do not read the bills they vote on. Had they actually read the TARP bill before it was passed, they would have seen that too much authority was granted to Paulson, and there was very little specificity as to how the funds would be monitored after allocation.
Although its true that legalese is not for the layman, perhaps there should be someone to translate the bills so that people can know what is actually contained in the bills. It does take time to learn, and without knowing what the phrases mean it is going to be hard to understand. That's why there dictionaries written (Black's Law Dictionary, as an example) for legalese.
Just another VBTA stunt.
As if it matters whether the layman can understand it, or not. They're not written for that purpose. Go back through history and you'll find few laws that are written with the layman in mind.
Hiding Behind Language
Legislators and the public need time to examine these bills before they're voted on. Isn't this the bill that Congress was to pass before the August recess? Even with the help of their staffs, there's no way both House and Senate could have read it, looked up the references to the other laws, and understood what they were voting on within the administration's original timeline. Over the summer, the House had less than 12 hours to review the Cap-and-Trade bill before voting. And the TARP bill was pushed through last spring without time for review--and everyone, including Congress, was shocked to find it allowed AIG to give executives large bonuses. Putting legislation in complex, technical language that references so many other pieces of legislation without giving either legislators OR the public time to study and digest it is just another way of disguising parts of a bill and hiding its true intent. Both parties are guilty of using bad writing to hide the truth; the one now in power is also guilty of trying to hide their intent by rushing these complex bills and demanding immediate votes.
So you think that's the way
So you think that's the way it should be?!
VBTA stunt?
C Fredrick, where in the story did this state the VBTA sponsored or was involved in this event? It did not. So why try to fool others into thinking what is not true? I applaud citizens joining together to attempt to understand what our Congress is doing and to point out to others that the healthcare bills are filled with thousands of pages of complex language written by lobbyists and containing changes that benefit special interests such as labor unions that are little more than a fund raising arm of the Democratic Party. However, the VBTA was not involved in this effort. I serve on the Board of the VBTA. While Mr. Dean serves as the VBTA Communications Director, this was simply one of the many other good ideas and efforts that Mr. Dean decided on his own to support. You see, Robert does what he can as a well informed citizen to try to make a positve difference in our community. We should be thankful to have citizens like Mr. Dean. He donates so much of his time and energy working to get out the truth about our government that is often ignored by the Progressive-leaning media. I appreciate and thank the Pilot for covering his event.
What?
Oh, the irony of this post is sickening. Greenmun trying to get back into the good graces of Robert Dean after Greenmun was chastised for his one sided extreme views on light rail and the clear view that the Chairman for Transportation of the VBTA does not speak for the VBTA on this transportation issue. Got that? But the greatest irony of this article is the fact that Robert Dean has chastised lawmakers for lack of clarity. I would invite any poster herein to go back to the video archives on the VB Municipal Cable Channel to watch and listen to Dean's frequent rambling and incoherent statements from the City Council dais, which frequently were followed by his vote of abstention because he really did not understand the issue. What else is new. But wait, it gets weirder. Here is the VBTA Chairman of Transportation, who does not speak for the VBTA on Light Rail, saying that the Communications Director of the VBTA is not speaking for the VBTA. What?
Problem
The problem that you run into is that the average civil servant that incorporates and administers these laws is not a lawyer and therefore has no more idea what the bill says than most laymen. While I know many civil service personnel that are diligently trying to do a good job, I also know that interpretation of some of the rules is done around the coffee pot trying to come to a consensus. Understandable language in a law would be a novel and useful idea.
It's not a new idea
When Clinton was in office, Gore and Clinton proposed a "plain language initiative," for all government agency workers. I'm not sure what happened to that initiative once Bush took office, but no, this isn't a new idea.
http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/award_winning/nogobbledygookannounce.cfm
That's the point!
"few laws that are written with the layman in mind."
That's the point that they are trying to make! The laws should be written with the layman in mind. Americans deserve to understand the laws that our elected representatives pass. We can't trust the media to interpret it for us. You'd get two very different interpretations if it was explained by MSNBC and FOX. That's why the people writing the law should have to explain it in plain English.
I would rather
watch paint dry
Good Idea but also explain it.
I have taken the time and read the whole bill and I think this is a great idea. However, it sould also include at times an explanation of what some of the paragraphs and sentences which are in legal language actually mean. Some of the parts are really ambigious as to what they mean or how they will be implemented. This is much of the problem with the bill.