This is a totally worthless and dishonest exercise. There is no such thing as “the Health Care Reform Bill.”

There is a bill in the House, which has passed Waxman’s committee but nothing else so far, and there are at least two bills working their way through the Senate.

The bills have little in common.

Before there is such a thing as “the Health Care Reform Bill,” there will have to be measures passed by both houses, and then a conference committee where major, major differences will have to be hammered out… if they can be.

It is dishonest in the extreme to tell American citizens that anyone, anywhere, has a clear idea what will even be in the two inputs to the conference committee, let alone what will pop out of it (probably in the dead of night, with a 4-hour ‘quick before they read it’ deadline for passage.)

Giving people this level of detail leads the average person to assume that someone actually has a copy of “the Health Care Reform Bill,” has read it, and can speak intelligently about it. When in fact that is not true.

This diary is not worth the electrons it took to copy-and-paste it.

(Standard disclaimer: I’m a liberal. I’m very very liberal. I see that the author of this particular diary classifies himself as an independent.)

Since we do have both to look at, I’ve tried to go over them myself. It’s pretty obvious that both authors are referring to the House version of the bill. I tend to agree with you that making either list is rather silly.

However, I have seen the first list posted on other websites, and I felt inclined to debunk it myself when I first saw it. I just couldn’t believe that any bill in front of either house of Congress for health care reform would include giving the government direct access to individual bank accounts, for example. And if it was true, I was going to be extremely upset!

One thing I saw as a liberal during a time when the White House and both houses of Congress were controlled by conservatives is that parroting poorly researched claims reflected badly on my cause. There was a lot of that out there — I’m sure we all recall the frantic efforts by armchair detectives in 2004 to figure out why people in conservative districts of Florida voted for Democrats in local office but Republican at the top of the ticket. If you’ve lived in the South, you know exactly why that was. So I always made an effort to research a claim before I repeated it.

If I were a conservative in this current political climate, I would want to do the same thing — and unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation out right now being repeated by people who claim to be conservative. It may seem odd to be giving “the other side” a tip — but just as on the job when I make efforts to work with other vendors (who are my competition) to provide the best support for my customer instead of trying to make them look bad and letting the customer suffer in the process, I think it hurts our nation as a whole for petty partisan bickering to take over political discourse.

Fortunately I don’t think many people on Redstate are passing on this kind of misinformation as fact.