Recently, I was made aware of the fact that the congress passed a health care reform action, of some sort. I don’t know what’s in it, but I don’t feel bad about that, because the people in congress who voted for it also don’t know what’s in it, either.

In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says the law may have significant unintended consequences for the “personal health insurance coverage” of senators, representatives and their staff members.

For example, it says, the law may “remove members of Congress and Congressional staff” from their current coverage, in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, before any alternatives are available.

The confusion raises the inevitable question: If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?

The law promises that people can keep coverage they like, largely unchanged. For members of Congress and their aides, the federal employees health program offers much to like. But, the report says, the men and women who wrote the law may find that the guarantee of stability does not apply to them.

People shouldn’t be expected to know everything about something that is as large as the health care reform whatchamacallit. Did you read your credit card agreement all the way through? No? Then don’t judge.

Those bills are complicated besides, and full of legalese that is written to be deliberately confusing, at least that’s the way it looks to me. And I’m pretty smart. I’ve done some smart stuff before, anyway. It takes smarts to write something like the commentary I’m writing now; at least as much smarts as it takes to pass a health care something-or-other.

Even the president himself (Barack Obama) understands that the bill was complicated and come on give it a chance, even if most other people (including those in congress) don’t. Remember the inspirational words he said just after the thingamajig was signed into law:

“Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm and you planted some seeds, and they came out the next day and they looked and – ‘Nothing’s happened. There’s no crop. We’re going to starve. Oh, no! It’s a disaster!’ It’s been a week, folks. So, before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place. Just a thought.”

It’s a good thought, too. Because the health care reform bill is like a seed that is planted, and you don’t know exactly what the seeds you planted are for. Are they for sunflowers, or are they for poison ivy? Maybe they’re for Mile-A-Minute Weed and pretty soon your yard is going to be full of that stuff and then nothing else will be able to grow.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I come across a package of seeds, and the packaging is in some cryptic language that I don’t understand. You know what I do when I find a package of seeds like that – a package of seeds that I don’t know what the heck the seeds are? I plant those puppies and see what comes up!

One of these days, what I’m hoping for is that the seeds will turn out to be magic seeds, like in the story “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Oh, man, that would be sweet. See, what happens in that story is that this guy, named Jack, trades his cow in for magic beans or something, and everybody says, “Oh, Jack, you stupid idiot, you bought a bunch of magic beans that won’t do nothing, on account of magic beans are just apocryphal [i.e., they are not real].” Well, Jack gets a little discouraged and then he throws those beans on the ground and you know what happens? I’ll tell you: This giant beanstalk grows out of the ground in the exact same place that Jack threw the beans. The beans were actually seeds, just like the health care thing that got passed! So when that happens Jack doesn’t stand around criticizing the new beanstalk, or wondering Oh no what is this giant beanstalk and what’s it doing to the country ?; no, he just climbs right up that beanstalk, it’s like twenty or thirty kilometers in the air (I think this story took place in Europe originally, but it’s just as applicable to America), and at the top of the beanstalk he finds this magical land full of all this great stuff, and he takes this giant gold-plated goose and then he comes back down the beanstalk, or something. To tell you the truth, I didn’t read that story all the way to the end, but that’s okay since the people in congress didn’t read the health care thingamabob all the way to the end, either.

The point is, we don’t know what kind of seeds we’ve planted, so we need to wait and see what we get in the next few years before we start to actually judge the thing that we did to ourselves.  Who knows, there might be some great giant gold-plated stuff waiting for us at the top of our brand-new beanstalks.

Maybe those giant gold-plated things will be new doctors?

Experts warn there won’t be enough doctors to treat the millions of people newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

That shortfall is predicted despite a push by teaching hospitals and medical schools to boost the number of U.S. doctors, which now totals about 954,000.

That is just stupid. First of all, even people in congress who voted for the whatever-it-is don’t know what its effects will be. How do these “experts” know there will be a “doctor shortage”?

Answer: We don’t know, until the seeds have grown into the giant beanstalks that will take us up into the sky where we will probably find our new gold-plated doctors to help treat our ailments.

In summation the president is absolutely correct. Let’s all be reasonable and take a deep breath and calmly wait until whatever it is that congress planted comes out of the ground and we all climb up and get our golden doctors before we start to judge it.

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Ricky Sprague

Ricky Sprague occasionally writes and/or draws things. He sometimes animates things. He has a Twitter account and he has a blog. He scripted this graphic novel about Kolchak The Night Stalker. He is really, really good at putting links in bios.

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