UPDATE:  See that stack of paper in the photo above.  That’s 1990 pages constituting the 900 billion dollar House health care bill.  Or to put it another way…$2.24 million per word.  Yikes!
So, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats passed historic health care legislation today.  Over 1900 pages of it.  At a cost of “only” 900 billion dollars.  Excluding increased expenses for the Medicare/Medicare programs.  And assuming “fraud and waste” are eliminated.  And we know the government is real good at that.  No worries though, Ms. Nancy assures us that this plan will save everyone money.  Except for those it doesn’t I suppose.  Like taxpayers.

But at least we have some recent models out there that demonstrate big government intervention can make a difference.  Like the Stimulus program:

An early progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government’s first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

Oops.  Ok, that’s probably not a good example of success.  So, ok then, no one can argue that the “cash for clunkers” program paid off:

A total of 690,000 new vehicles were sold under the Cash for Clunkers program last summer, but only 125,000 of those were vehicles that would not have been sold anyway, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the automotive Web site Edmunds.com.

The average rebate was $4,000. But the overwhelming majority of sales would have taken place anyway at some time in the last half of 2009, according to Edmunds.com. That means the government ended up spending about $24,000 each for those 125,000 additional vehicle sales.

Hmm.  On second thought, maybe we are screwed.