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  • 2017-06-22 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Nancy Pelosi Say Obamacare Must be Passed to 'Find Out What Is in It'? (en)
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  • On 21 June 2017, the web site Chicks on the Right reported that Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had said, of the Affordable Care Act, in 2010 We [need] to pass the bill in order to find out what [is] in it. The website contrasted this with Pelosi's tweet, on 20 June 2017, in which she declared that Americans deserve to know what was in the Republican health care bill being developed during the summer of 2017: And here's the video cited by Chicks on the Right, of her 2010 remarks: As can be seen, it's true that Pelosi did utter these words: We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it. 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. Like much reporting and commentary surrounding that remark over the next seven years, the Chicks on the Right article also left out the remarks made by Pelosi in the lead-up to the now-infamous soundbite. Pelosi was speaking at the National Association of Counties' annual Legislative Conference on 9 March 2010, in Washington D.C. A full transcript of her speech can be viewed here, but we've included some relevant context surrounding her comments on the Affordable Care Act: Although the point was not made clearly or explicitly, the sense of Pelosi's remarks was that the benefits (in her view) of the bill -- rather than the contents of the bill -- would only be fully revealed to the public after the legislation was passed and implemented. Pelosi explained and defended her 2010 remarks in June 2012 during a meeting with op-ed writers, as reported by the Washington Post: 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). (en)
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