Okay, Standard Mischief, knock yourself out.
UPDATE: TNR has a summary of the changes, if you want a “Cliff’s notes” version.
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March 18, 2010 by tgirsch
Okay, Standard Mischief, knock yourself out.
UPDATE: TNR has a summary of the changes, if you want a “Cliff’s notes” version.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
One is forced to wonder how hard they had to work to get it under $1,000,000,000,000.
The reconciliation bill may be on-line, but it’s not at thomas.gov. I wonder what the significance of that is? Maybe this is not the authoritative version or perhaps they still want to make changes? That’s the type of standard mischief I wouldn’t put past the (D) or the (R) crowd.
Ask Ms. Slaughter, however, and I’m sure she would pinky swear it’s the whole deal.
It’s amazing how the New Republic published the summery already, it’s like they’ve pretented to actually have read the thing.
let’s see…. ” Strike all after the enacting clause and insert the
following: …” Oh this is going to take a while. I’ve been given my 2 days (assuming I take off tomorrow), does anyone have 2 lawyers they can spare?
it’s up. They just have really fucked up permalinks.
I don’t remember ever finding anything on thomas until AFTER the vote. But I’ve never looked all that hard.
Anyway, fear not. A lot more than two lawyers are combing the thing over.
Well it’s not like there’s any technical hurdles to the practice of prompt publication, it’s just doing so takes a lot of power away from the congress-critter.
I damn well know that Slaughter has in her hands a copy of the US Code, with the original text struck out and the layers of substitution placed inline, color coded. for all the different layers of changes. She could release it, but that would be showing her hand.
The real work is applying all the changes…
or we can skip all of that “dumping the plain text out of the pdf and apply the changes to the bill that applies changes to the US code” and just rely on the helpful “summery” that Rep. Slaughter thoughtfully provided (hint: it’s the only plain HTML document supplied)
Yeah, see, now you’re just whining.
Judd,
They really didn’t have to work all that hard to get the preliminary CBO score of total 10 year cost under $1,000,000,000,000. First, the tax revenue begins in year 1 (Y1). Then, per the proposal, we spend $17 billion for Y1-Y4 . Finally, for Y5-Y10 , we spend $923 billion . So, we essentially get 10 years of revenue (taxes) compared to 6 years of spending in order to pretend the 10 year cost is under $1 trillion (apparently we can meet the urgent demand to act now to save 40,000 people from dying every year for lack of health insurance by spending just over $4 billion a year for 4 years, but it gets a heap more expensive for the next 6).
Then, to make it appear as if we reduce the deficit with the bill, the Democrats pretend we can take $500 billion from Medicare without further threatening its solvency; and pretend that Congress will let doctors take a 21-23% reduction in their medicare reimbursement rates next year (variously estimated at roughly $250-$350 billion). There are additional gimmicks used to make the scoring much better than it realistically is.
But, finally, let’s not forget that even if we make the unreasonable assumptions and ignore the gimmickry, this is still one big, expensive, new entitlement program that will forever increase government spending, all at a time when we have record high deficits, a $12 trillion public debt, and other entitlement programs that are fast approaching insolvency.
correction: “from dying every year” (not day).
Transparency: From Politico (http://www.politico.com/livepulse/0310/EXCLUSIVE__Democrats_plan_doc_fix_after_reform.html?showall):
“Democrats are planning to introduce legislation later this spring that would permanently repeal annual Medicare cuts to doctors, but are warning lawmakers not to talk about it for fear that it will complicate their push to pass comprehensive health reform. The plans undercut the party’s message that reform lowers the deficit, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.
“Democrats removed the so-called doc fix from the reform legislation last year because its $371-billion price tag would have made it impossible for Democrats to claim that their bill reduces the deficit. Republicans have argued for months that by stripping the doc fix from the bill, Democrats were playing a shell game.
“’Most health staff are already aware that our health proposal does not contain a ‘doc fix.’ … The inclusion of a full SGR repeal would undermine reform’s budget neutrality. So again, do not allow yourself (or your boss) to get into a discussion of the details of CBO scores and textual narrative. Instead, focus only on the deficit reduction and number of Americans covered,’ the memo, sent Thursday to Democratic staff, said.”
Politico has apparently pulled the report above for now at least until it can confirm the legitimacy of the memo. Democrats have alleged it’s a fabricated memo.
I, too, question the authenticity of the memo. Sounds pretty Rovian to me. But in any case, what makes you think they could pass such a bill, even if they wanted to?
I don’t know what to think of the memo. It certainly lines up with the talking points from the Democrats over the last few days about not getting bogged down in the “process in Washington”. Of course, to be successful, a fabrication has to at least sound right. So, at this point, who knows?
It doesn’t matter whether they vote for a permanent doc-fix, or just keep postponing the scheduled reductions, the political cost of allowing physicians to take such a cut in reimbursements nearly ensures that they won’t. And that’s why they postpone the cuts every time it comes up. The only thing that will change that political calculus is if we reach a tipping point where enough doctors have stopped taking Medicare patients that the pressure of the remaining few is significantly reduced.
Not at all.
I’ve already stated that the authors used computers to draft such a crazy and complex piece of legislation, and that all I wanted to do was to have the exact same advantage with the computer on my end.
Besides checksumming the amendments and bills as soon as they are introduced, Congress could write them in a kind of “patch” format. It should not be too hard to come up with something that both humans could read and computers could automatically process. The “patch” file for the amendments could also be auto-generated by a computer program. (I’d be really surprised if there wasn’t a good format already in existence. I can grok the differences when I do so on the code I write at work)
SM, actually, I already suggested exactly the kind of patching you want (but I was certainly jargony enough that there’s no reason for you to have realized that we’re suggesting the same thing).
A very easy, and at least good, if not optimal solution would be
* Keep underlying data in some text-plus-markup format. LaTeX would be a good choice, but is hardly the only one.
* The markup source should be rendered into PDF and served in parallel to the source.
* Text (even with markup) is very easy to make patches/diffs of, and often the gist of the diff can be understood even without rendering the source into PDF.
* The version history of all source text should be served via a standard web protocol (such as WebDAV).
* The version control system should use strong cryptographic signatures. There’s several systems that have add-ons to do this. ‘Git’ does it by default.
* The signatures would allow not only authentication and assured record keeping, but also provide a good way for the public at large to track changes. I guarantee that if Congress launched a WebDAV Git server with the current laws and any current proposals, the server would be mirrored by thousands of groups within hours. And a smaller number of groups (probably dozens) would also immediately start publishing verifications of the signatures, as well as printing hard-to-hack copies of the signatures (e.g. publishing hex fingerprints in paper-and-ink journals).
Of course, even the Congress loved this idea, I don’t think they’re capable of implementing it, even though it’d probably cost a few tens of thousands of dollars in all.
[...] Back when we had a whole 72 hours to decode such standard mischief as : …strike the first four letters on the fifth word of the second sentence in section 170(c)(2)(B) an… [...]