Seeing Your Own Reflection in Health Reform Visualizations [UPDATED]

(With Micah Sifry)

We're always intrigued when we see inside-the-Beltway groups embracing new technologies, so when we heard about the National Taxpayers Union's new visualization comparing the words being used by President Obama to describe health care reform and the actual words in the House bill, we decided to take a closer look.

National Taxpayers Union is using a pair of word clouds to make the case that the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is full of "the oppressive language of big government," while at the same time Obama's speeches are emphasizing more positive concepts like "freedom," "rights," and "choice." Among the words in H.R. 3200 tagged by NTU as oppressive: "regulate," "prohibit," and "taxes."

Now, legislation, of course, isn't a political speech or high-minded manifesto. The job of a bill in Congress is to detail the limits and responsibilities of government. So critiquing a bill for being full of the word "regulate" is a bit like begrudging the Burger King menu for using the dollar sign a lot. That said, the House Democrats' bill doesn't even contain the word "regulate" at all. (As for prohibit, another NTU "oppressive" word, it pops up in the context of "prohibiting discrimination" and "prohibiting pre-existing condition exclusions.")

Asked about the discrepancy, National Taxpayers Union's director of government affairs Andrew Moylan responded, "We looked for variations of the same core words, so for 'regulate' we also searched for 'regulations.' In our analysis, that appeared 91 times. We also tried to do some filtering to weed out the 'false positives.' For example, the word 'choices' appears in the bill's title, and there are many references within the bill that simply utilize the full title 'America’s Affordable Health Choices Act.' We removed those from our count and only included those in 'active' parts of the legislation."

It is true that a variant of the word regulate is in fact peppered throughout the text of the House Democrats' health care reform bill. The term "Regulation" is used quite a bit in the Democrats' bill, some 127 times. That's a lot. But, as it turns out, on a per-word basis, it's actually less than the number of times that the oppressive word "regulation" was used in a recent major piece of Republican health legislation, the Medicare prescription drug overhaul bill that Republicans pushed through Congress in 2003. The Democratic health care plan has one mention of regulation for every 1,252 words. H.R. 1, the 2003 Republican drug plan managed to slip in a mention of regulation once every 1002 words. By the NTU's metric, the last major Republican health reform plan is more laden with oppressive language than the Democratic bill currently before Congress.

All of which serves as a reminder that, in politics, data can both illuminate and obfuscate. As Moyland notes, congressional bills are dry, repetitive, boring stuff, full of bureaucratic gobbledygook. Here, for example, is a word cloud of every single word in the Democrats' health overhaul plan:

UPDATE: Moylan follows up: "The purpose of our project was not to make any kind of partisan point, but rather to show the disconnect between the rhetoric used to support health care reform bills and the actual content of said legislation. I’m glad that you pointed out the equally 'oppressive' content of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit bill, because NTU vigorously opposed that bill as well (links 1, 2, and 3), a position that didn’t win us many friends in Republican circles at the time. The floor vote on the legislation received the highest weight of the year in our annual Rating of Congress. The bottom line, from our perspective, is that President Obama and Congressional Democrats are using rhetoric traditionally associated with the right to promote a bill that is anathema to conservative principles."