sick on arrival

Calling it 'the Ben Hur of Legislation', the House GOP has finally released their long-promised alternative Health Care bill. Unveiling it Wednesday morning at a Capitol Hill press conference, the massive 14,600 page bill was almost the height of a John Boehner, and considerably weightier. "Oh man, this is one great bill," said Minority Whip Eric Cantor. "You want comprehensive? We've got comprehensive. The Democratic bill, what was that, about 1800 pages? It didn't even list any diseases. We have all the diseases - Aasgenaes syndrome, Aarskog syndrome, Abasia, Abdominal aortic aneurysm, Abdominal cystic lymphangioma, Abdominal neoplasm, Aberrant subclavian artery, and Ablepharon macrostomia syndrome, just to name a few. There's over 20,000 diseases defined by the World Health Organization, and I'm pretty sure we've got every one." Indeed they do, and each disease has it's own description, along with a suggested insurance reimbursement rate for treatment, and an analysis of whether or not it could be counted as a pre-existing condition. Also interspersed throughout the document is the full text of 'Finnegan's Wake', 'Atlas Shrugged', and the 1611 translation of the King James Bible. "When you're reading about all of that disease, you really have a need to break it up a little, and that's what we've done," explains Cantor. "We've included something for the mind, something for the spirit, and something for the soul. It's important to get that sort of sustenance, because you'll be thinking of the human body as pretty much of a lost cause long before you even get to Axial mesodermal dysplasia spectrum."