The unveiling of a chart that exposes the bureaucratic nightmare also known as “healthcare reform” has made a media splash on the blogosphere and cable news channels, as well it should. In this day and age, bait-and-switch policies are made too simple by the complexity of trillion dollar legislation. This sad state of contemporary policy-making was evidenced last month, when the House of Representatives narrowly passed a 1,500 page major cap-and-trade climate change boondoggle that no one had bothered to read.

A picture, however, is worth a thousand words (perhaps even 1,500 pages) which is why the healthcare chart is such a powerful symbol-it visualizes the impact of a major policy that absolutely no one understands, with the obvious exception of Members of Congress and the lobbyists who wrote it.

The office of the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives compiled a similar type of chart to inform the debate over the climate change bill late last month. A copy is shown below.