rd1978 wrote:Not one member of Congress who voted for the bill bothered to read it, let alone understand it.
Some statements take on a life of their own, repeated endlessly by those who would like to believe them, but with no hint of where the evidence of the fact asserted comes from. I would like to know who surveyed the 535 members of Congress and discovered that not a single one of them ever read the Affordable Care Act. As far as I can tell, this is something Michael Steele (does anyone remember him?) said on June 30, 2009, when he thought that Democrats in the House were trying to bring their version of healthcare reform to a vote before adjourning for Independence Day. Of course that never happened, and the bill took more than eight more months to pass, but the meme lives on. Mere repetition doesn't make it true. Does anyone actually have a citation to someone in a position to know that proves that
no one in Congress read the bill?
And please please please don't give me the Nancy Pelosi quotation, you know, the one where she says,"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy." That was on March 9, 2010, at a time when the Senate version of the bill, which the House was preparing to vote on, had been available in final form since December 24. It wasn't a very artful statement, but in context she was clearly saying that passing the bill would allow the public to separate the many false claims about the bill from its actual content.
