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March 1, 2012 · By Guest Author · 0 Comments
By John Vinci
Americans for Limited Government
As long as the Obamacare statutes1 are, its implementing regulations are now five times its length. With the publication of two new regulations in the Federal Register on February 27, 2012, we calculate Obamacare regulations to contain 2,163,744 words2 compared to 425,116 words in the Obamacare statutes. That’s a million words longer than the last time we wrote about the length of Obamacare regulations last April.
Past calculations of Obamcare’s length focus on the number of pages it contains. But, as any high school or college student can tell you, the number of pages depends on font size, line spacing, and margins. So, some have calculated Obamacare to be over 2,000 pages long. This was true when it was in bill form. But now that it has been signed into law, its statute form is just 961 pages.
But because Obamacare has the same number of words no matter how you format it, word count is a more accurate way of calculating its length.
Just how long is 2,163,744 words?
The epic novel War and Peace is only 560,000 words long.
Atlas Shrugged weighs in at 645,000 words.
The Obamacare regulations appear to have even eclipsed what Wikipedia considers the longest published novel in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. Artamène, or Cyrus the Great (in French: Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus) is a ten-volume, 13,095 page novel containing 2,100,000+ words.
By our count the King James Version of the Bible contains 830,314 words.4 That makes Obamacare regulations two and a half times as long as the Bible! If you add the text of the Obamacare statutes to its regulations, they are together three times as long as the Bible!
The average reader reads at a rate of 250 to 300 words per minute, but when reading detailed documents such as regulations the rate drops to 200 words per minute.5
At 200 words per minute, the Obamacare Regulations would take 180 hours to read. That’s seven and a half days of non-stop reading; it’s four and a half 40-hour business weeks.
The length of these regulations exemplifies not only the complexities that Obamacare has placed on the Medical and Insurance communities, but also the need to vigilantly monitor these regulations as they are published. We at ObamacareWatcher.org encourage you to join us as we do just that.
1 Obamacare is made up of two statutes: Public Law 111-148 and Public Law 111-152.
2 This includes 98 documents such as requests for information, advance notices of proposed rulemakings, proposed rules, interim final rules and final rules, and some notices. However, with some exceptions, we excluded guidance and “bulletin” documents that are not subject to the normal notice and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act. We also excluded many regulation documents which were only in part affected by the Obamacare statues.
3 P.L.111-148 is 906 pages and P. L. 111-152 is 55 pages.
4 We calculated the number of words in the King James Bible by using the “Summary” feature of Notepad++ on the ASCII text version of the KJV available at http://printkjv.ifbweb.com/AV_txt.zip. The preface, table of contents, and other introductory remarks were removed before performing the word count.
5 Ziefle, M. (1998), Effects of display resolution on visual performance, Human Factors, 40(4), 555-568.
John Vinci is a staff attorney with Americans for Limited Government and is the editor in chief for the www.obamacarewatcher.org website.
Note: Reader comments are reviewed before publishing, and only salient comments that add to the topic will be published. Profanity is absolutely not allowed and will be summarily deleted. Spam, copied statements and other material not comprised of the reader’s own opinion will also be deleted.
In his latest expansion of his own power, on June 15 Barack Obama issued an executive action essentially and summarily granting legal status to perhaps 800,000 illegal immigrants. Whether one agrees with the DREAM Act — which would have done essentially the same thing — or not, everyone should agree it was up to Congress to pass it, or not, at its discretion. Does Obama think he is above the law?
Gary Harvey is the brain injured man from New York, who seems to have his own private “death panel” determined to kill him off and to make his and his wife’s life as miserable as possible, until the sentence is carried out. Though it wasn’t Sara sitting on the so-called ethics committee that determined Gary should be starved and dehydrated to death, the Guardian and County (who actually were involved in the attempted death of an innocent person) have suggested she is a danger to her husband. This has been going on for several years now, and it's time to move on. It's time to stop making Sara pay for being a wife fighting for her husband.
The Obama administration over the last 3 ½ years have clearly revealed to all who and what they are all about. Anything which stands for our founding Father’s vision for America Obama and his Marxist cronies have opposed lock stock and barrel. So when I saw that a U.S. president called to congratulate the new anti Semitic president of radical Islam’s Islamic Brotherhood I was not surprised, for it is par for the course with President Obama.
The election results from 2008 represented the second exception to the rule, the first being Clinton’s innocent boy hoodwinking of the voting public. In both cases, Clinton and now Obama, the road to the Oval Office traveled through and was filtered by our main stream media (MSM). Given these two exceptions, stemming largely from public emotion rather than logic, our MSM has forever turned the corner into large disbursements of governmental propaganda.
We, the lovers of freedom and the supporters of limited government cannot merely wait the clock out on the Obama presidency. If this slide into tyranny is not stopped, it will continue. If it is not protested, it will be accepted. I know there are not enough Senators to convict but if these blatant attacks upon the checks and balances are not punished, at least by the shame and reproach of an Impeachment Resolution, they are being silently condoned. Speaker Boehner: stand up and lead the House! Don’t just make a speech; present a case.
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"We don't intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended. We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support. Turning the party over to the so-called moderates wouldn't make any sense at all." - Ronald Reagan, Nov. 10, 1964 |
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