Keeping Secrets from the People?

First, do YOU know exactly what’s IN the Ryan healthcare bill?

And I don’t mean what Ryan and his cronies have told us was included in the bill – and how the bill accomplished the repeal of the ACA (Obamacare) and replaced it with something measurably better. And I don’t mean the flowery rhetoric that President Trump uses to convince us that he’s looking out for us when he presses for its passage.

Do you KNOW?

If you KNOW, I’d like to know how you learned the details. Frankly, right now I’ve seen so many interpretations from so many sources (mostly untrustworthy sources) that I’m suspicious that it’s part of a conspiracy to keep us, the taxpaying citizens, in the dark about what we’re being expected to fund.

I don’t think that I do know and that troubles me. I have not seen a brief, concise, explanation of the bill and why we should accept it by anyone that I trust.

I’m satisfied that it doesn’t accomplish what we conservatives wanted or the Freedom Caucus would have welcomed and supported it. I think that I know more about what it doesn’t include than I know about what it does cover.

I’ve looked at several supposed summaries of the bill, including on Ryan’s own website and they’re not detailed enough to give me any real insight on what’s in the bill – mostly they just identify a problem and say they’ll fix it.

In the absence of a trusted summary of the bill, I took the route of last resort and found the actual text of the bill. It’s HERE if anyone else is interested in reading it (it’s a 66-page .pdf).

That’s when the truth slapped me upside my head. I’ve wasted time doing this before.

I’ve attempted to understand some proposed legislation by going to the source – the actual bill itself – and that is an exercise in futility. It’s not just that legislation is written in legally-specific language, the bills are the very essence of legal documents and they must describe (in minute detail) the hows and whys of everything that’s covered by the bill. I understand that.

But, I must say that it’s next to impossible for anyone outside of the legislative aides to actually make sense out of a bill like this one. It’s not lengthy; 66-pages is a thumbnail sketch compared to the original 2,700 pages of the ACA. The problem is paragraphs like this one:

1396r–4(f)) is amended—

11 (1) in paragraph (7)—

12 (A) in subparagraph (A)—

13 (i) in clause (i)—

14 (I) in the matter preceding sub-

15 clause (I), by striking ‘‘2025’’ and in-

16 serting ‘‘2019’’; and

17 (ii) in clause (ii)—

18 (I) in subclause (I), by adding

19 ‘‘and’’ at the end;

20 (II) in subclause (II), by striking

21 the semicolon at the end and inserting …

You get the drift. You can’t possibly interpret the text of the bill without having immediate availability to the verbiage that is being amended.

The aides who actually write legislation must have software that can allow them to logically (and instantaneously) follow all of the referenced linkage and maintain a continuous flow of thought.

Maybe you can do it, I can’t and I’m a reasonably intelligent guy. Frankly, I don’t think it’s possible for an individual to read a bill (even a tiny one like Ryan’s) and interpret the facts of what it will do and how it’ll be accomplished if you don’t also have access to and understand the portion(s) of other documents it references. That’s easy; you can’t.

So, how are we, the taxpayers and the people who will ultimately foot the bill for whatever our representative’s pass supposed to understand what our representatives and Senators are voting for or against?

One of the “benefits” of this excessive complication is that we, the people, are kept in the dark about exactly what the bill will do (or not do). We are forced to accept what our representative or someone in the media tells us. Perhaps years ago, when honesty was more common, that worked, but nowadays placing our trust in the media and even some of our “trusted” congresspersons is unwise.

This Ryan healthcare bill isn’t really a good example of my “conspiracy theory” because it’s a dinky little 66 pages – but the original ACA (Obamacare) bill is. How many of our members of Congress do you think READ all 2,700 pages of that bill (and understood the ramifications therein) before voting on it?

Remember when Nancy Pelosi told us that they’d have to pass it to find out what was in it? And she was right; there were a number of hidden “gotchas” in the ACA that no one caught until they were actually activated, in some cases, years later.

Even our president, the one individual that we always thought we could trust to tell us the truth, intentionally LIED directly to us – multiple times about the effect that the ACA would have on us.

My point is, we taxpayers need a source for learning what is contained in proposed legislation – in a close to conversational format – so we can be sure of our support for or opposition against it.

If you know of such a source, please note it here, I’d honestly like to have a reliable source for objective information about pending legislation.

Thanks,

Garnet92.

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Categories: Political

Tags: Complex Legislation