the proposed bill leading to the ACA was avaiable for everyone to see and read. for months. interested people could follow the legislative process all the time.
Are you ignorant or just plain stupid?
Oh, the irony. It has been a decade and you inbred morons are still repeating the same, tired,
canard.
However, the article left out important context, including the next few words of Pelosi’s statement: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
The last words don't really help that much. Also, in the posted video, those words don't get cut.
Click the link. You need the whole speech here than nobody will read? Okay....
Imagine an economy where people could follow their aspirations, where they could be entrepreneurial, where they could take risks professionally because personally their families [sic] health care needs are being met. Where they could be self-employed or start a business, not be job-locked in a job because they have health care there, and if they went out on their own it would be unaffordable to them, but especially true, if someone has a child with a pre-existing condition. So when we pass our bill, never again will people be denied coverage because they have a pre-existing condition.
We have to do this in partnership, and I wanted to bring [you] up to date on where we see it from here. The final health care legislation that will soon be passed by Congress will deliver successful reform at the local level. It will offer paid for investments that will improve health care services and coverage for millions more Americans. It will make significant investments in innovation, prevention, wellness and offer robust support for public health infrastructure. It will dramatically expand investments into community health centers. That means a dramatic expansion in the number of patients community health centers can see and ultimately healthier communities. Our bill will significantly reduce uncompensated care for hospitals.
You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention–it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.
But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.
She wasn't talking about legislators, she was talking about us, the American people. She clarified her statement.
“In the fall of the year,” Pelosi said, “the outside groups … were saying ‘it’s about abortion,’ which it never was. ‘It’s about ‘death panels,’’ which it never was. ‘It’s about a job-killer,’ which it creates four million [jobs]. ‘It’s about increasing the deficit’; well, the main reason to pass it was to decrease the deficit.” Her contention was that the Senate “didn’t have a bill.” And until the Senate produced an actual piece of legislation that could be matched up and debated against what was passed by the House, no one truly knew what would be voted on.
“So, that’s why I was saying we have to pass a bill, so we can see, so that we can show you, what it is and what it isn’t,” Pelosi continued. “It is none of these things. It’s not going to be any of these things.”
Most important, the contents of the Affordable Care Act had been publicly
available and publicly debated for months when Pelosi made her remarks in March 2010. The
bill, in its original form, was passed by the House of Representatives in October 2009, and in the Senate that December. Although the bill was unusually long (the act runs to
906 pages in the legislative record, with many more pages of regulations) its contents had been subjected to intensive debate and scrutiny in both houses of Congress.
That process was fundamentally different to the secrecy surrounding the Republican-sponsored American Health Care Act, when Pelosi tweeted on 20 June 2017 that “Americans deserve to know what’s in the [Republican healthcare] bill.” At that time, the architects of the legislation had not published any of its contents. (A
draft of the bill was published on 22 June 2017, two days after Pelosi’s tweet).
