Massive US health care reform bill contributing to deforestation: 1,990 pages and 19.6 pounds of paper(NaturalNews) If you want to save the world's forests, don't print out the health care legislation just passed by the US House of Representatives: It's 1,990 pages long and weighs 19.6 pounds, reports the Wall Street Journal, making it longer than the King James Bible.
The U.S. Government Printing Office, has reportedly printed 1,335 copies of the bill, totaling 2.6 million pages of paper. This massive volume of paper required nearly 319 trees to produce. (Source: Conservatree.org) And this doesn't even include all the paper used by citizens, lawyers, and health-related companies who are printing the bill themselves, on their own inkjet or laser printers.
It's not unreasonable to estimate that many thousands of trees have been destroyed just for the purpose of printing out this monstrous, virtually unreadable health care bill.
And the carbon footprint of cutting the trees, producing the paper, printing the 1,990-page bill and distributing it to members of Congress must be enormous.
The bill is so large, one Congressman says that when he left his copy unattended on the House floor, it triggered a security alert after someone reported the bag containing the mass of papers, calling it a "suspicious object."
It is suspicious object, indeed. Because what it contains are words describing a disastrous new medical tyranny that would force bankrupt Americans to buy into a pharmaceutical-centric health insurance scam or be arrested and sent to prison for up to five years. The bill is absolutely full of handouts to pharmaceutical companies, the mental health industry, and dishonest "sick care" practices. Its 1,990 pages describe the most bloated, doomed-to-fail "sick care" train wreck any nation has ever had the misfortune to suffer under.
I'm not saying the current system is any better -- it isn't. But replacing one failed system with another failed system (while calling it a success) is ridiculous.
If you happen to have hundreds of spare hours readily available, and you really enjoy listening to the language of legislative obfuscators pretending to be lawmakers, you can download audio files read by professional voice actors who have miraculously managed to read the virtually unintelligible health care bill into free audio recordings. Give them a listen, if you dare, at
http://www.HearTheBill.orgIf the bill gets any longer and needs to be printed again, we may need to take emergency action to prevent further deforestation of the planet. Should the bill be reconciled with the Senate and signed into law by the President, we'll see yet more deforestation from all the senseless paperwork created by this new government bureaucracy.
All the basic principles of health can be described in just one page. That means this bill is 1,989 pages of bureaucratic doublespeak and Big Pharma protectionism.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.conservatree.org/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml
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