House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has delivered on her promise to unveil a comprehensive health-insurance overhaul bill (pdf). It’s 1,990 pages long, which I am happy to report I have fully read and digested.Just kidding . . . which is what anyone who tells you he has read and fully understands the bill will be doing too.Many summaries will be issued in the coming days, but don’t expect to find in those summaries the following:

• A list of all the undefined powers given to the secretary of health and human services and the new officers and commissions created by the bill;
• An estimate of how far off the cost projections will be, particularly for the deficit.  The CBO says the deficit will fall as a result of the bill. Don’t read about that while drinking a hot beverage unless you want to exhale it through your nose;
• A list of the accounting tricks used to get the price tab below $1 trillion. But we do know that the “total that didn’t include money needed to avoid a scheduled 21 percent cut in doctor fees under Medicare, and omitted other items as well” (Associated Press).
  
• The projected date when the government’s “public option” insurance program will go to Congress for a bailout. See the Federal Flood Insurance Program and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac for guidance;
• An estimate of how long before doctors are denounced for refusing to take “public option,” Medicare, and Medicaid patients because the reimbursements are too low;
• A prediction of which state will be first to be bankrupted by the expansion of Medicaid and when;
• A projection of the shortfall in revenue expected from the new millionaire’s tax that is supposed to finance the program;
• An estimate of how long it will take for it all to transmogrify into a single-payer system, which is what the sponsors really want.

There will be a lot of talk about choice and competition during discussion of this bill. Keep your Newspeak Dictionary close by.