House Democrats health care bill

House Democrats have health care bill

The House Democrats get at deal, and The Washington Post declares it breaking news.

News Alert
10:35 AM EDT Thursday, October 29, 2009

House Democrats unveil health-care reform legislation

Bill includes a government insurance option and a historic expansion of Medicaid, although sticking points in the legislation involving abortion and immigration remain unresolved.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/IKR2QE/8811G/0ORYE7/OLG8VW/N3694/E4/t

The Post expanded their report on the health care bill here: House health-care reform bill to include public option by Shailagh Murray October 29, 2009.

Searching for a phrase that gives only reactions to this announcement was unsuccessful. There has been too much microblogging about the House and Democrats and health care reform. This is the TweetVolume finds for three possibilities.

I decided "house (dems OR democrats) health bill" picked up tweets that either of the others did not get. The initial search found 1360 Twitter messages with this combination of words. 360 of the messages were from the date of the announcement -- October 29. The first was from October 19. I am sure there would have been more if Twitter would search farther back in time. It does mean an average of only 100 per day before the 29th.

The search was terminated April 6, 2010 with a total of 16,008 messages found.

The figure shows the distribution over time.

There are small spikes in October of 2009 and large spikes in March of 2010 when the health care legislation was in final passage.

The files are house (dems OR democrats) health bill.xml and ©, which is a tab delimited file that can be read with Excel.