Health Care Bill and Programming

I'm a physicist who spends most of his time programming, so I suppose I can claim two professions. In my capacity as a programmer, I contend that it is trivially obvious that the proposed health care reform bill will seriously damage the American health care systems. It represents far reaching changes to the laws (including granting the administration access to all IRS records) in a way that is not only uninspected but untestable. Each clause acts like a statement in a program, adding to or replacing other action statements in a huge body of laws--and we have on offer is a thousand pages of patches to tens of thousands of pages of laws and perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages of subsequent regulations and legal rulings. Nobody has (or IMnsHO can) do a code walkthrough on this heap. It gives a whole new meaning to "Blue Screen of Death."

I have no say in this, of course. My CongressCritter (Baldwin) considers it her pride and joy and is only sad that it doesn't more explicitly compel state control. If she held "town hall meetings" I could try to join, but I'm under no illusions about the welcome given unscripted comments. The core of the district is Madison, so there's no need to hire outsiders to shout down contrary views.

I'm not claiming the system we have is perfect. (For example, I can prove that palmistry is worthless. If it weren't, insurance companies would use it to figure out when to cancel policies.) But the systems mostly work (the quoted number of 47 million uninsured is a lie). They need some work. Carefully analyzed work. This bill isn't.