A spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner today ridiculed President Obama’s health care proposal because it’s too short.
“The White House’s ‘plan’ consists of an 11-page outline, which has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office or posted online as legislative text. So they want to reorganize one-sixth of the United States’ economy with a document shorter than a comic book, and they’re complaining that they can’t find our plan on their own website? C’mon,” said the spokesman, Michael Steel, in an email to reporters.
Boehner and other Republicans have attacked the Democrats’ health care bills in both the House and the Senate for being too long.
“The best way to get a sense of what Speaker Pelosi’s takeover of health care looks like is to actually look at it. Just shy of 2,000 pages, it runs more than 620 pages longer than the government-run plan Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993,” Boehner said in the weekly Republican address in October. He also said the bill is “1,990 pages of bureaucracy.”
Boehner and others have carried around copies of the bill to rallies and TV interviews to show how long it is.
After releasing Obama’s proposal yesterday, the White House has attacked Republicans for not posting their proposals online. Republicans have hit back, saying their ideas have been online — and are even linked from the White House web site.
On Thursday, the two sides will meet in a bipartisan health care summit at the White House.
Late update: Doug Thornell, an adviser to DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen, hit back in a statement to TPMDC:
Last week, Washington Republicans were exposed as being hypocrites on the Recovery Act. Now with their latest and weakest criticism of health reform, it looks like they are also schizophrenics. First it was too long, now it’s too short. Goldilocks is easier to please than these folks. It took them until a few days before the House vote to even produce a health care bill that was drafted behind closed doors and might as well have been a Xeroxed copy of insurance company talking points. It’s amazing the lengths they are going to avoid talking about their health reform proposals in public.
