Reid introduces health care bill

Reid introduces health care bill for $849 billion

The Washington Post led with the cost

News Alert
04:50 PM EST Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Reid to unveil $849 billion health-care bill

Senate majority leader's proposal is projected by budget analysts to cut the deficit by $127 billion over the next decade, a senior leadership aide said.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/0H2RO6/787QE/95HNPI/SGF7LC/4Z8X2/6C/t

The next day story from The Post.

The Post story after the vote.

But when I looked for a search phrase the language was all over the place. So no language with specificity, $849 billion for example, captured a majority of comments on the bill.

So, I went with generic language. Three fifths of the 1500 tweets were from November 18 and either were about the bill that Reid would introduce or were about the bill as they learned about it. But the language "reid health bill" is so generic that it could become something completely different from what The Post characterized as "breaking news."

Since I got 1500 tweets and three-fifths were specifically from the day of the 'breaking news' event that means I got the whole stream -- plus a bit.

I could either try to cut off the stream once it moves beyond the initial messaging about the Reid bill or I could just use this as the major stream for tracking messaging about the senate legislation -- unless something else big happens.

At some point on the 19th the phrasing moved from "Reid health bill" to "senate health bill" So I am going to track both -- though by the evening of the 19th "reid health bill" was not getting much action. And there were 1500 tweets about "senate health bill" beginning at 1:35 p.m. on the 19th.

This is a moving target. 'reid health bill' and 'senate health bill' got no messages this morning, Saturday when the vote is scheduled. So I started looking again. It looks like "senate health" is it -- simplify, simplify, simplify. The Archivist search produced 1500 messages reaching back to November 20 [Friday] at 9:48 p.m. So it has been a pretty busy stream.

Voting down cloture brought another breaking news. It is hard to know where the tweets will come from, but I already have three files here and separate searches for two senators who announed that they would vote with majority. So, I am going to stick the 'breaking news' here and hope that is not too far off.

News Alert
08:08 PM EST Saturday, November 21, 2009

Senate votes to bring health measure to the floor

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) this evening secured the 60 votes needed to move an $848 billion health-care reform bill to the Senate floor for debate, clearing the way for amendment deliberations to begin after the Thanksgiving recess.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/TNGYL1/OYPIH/RUKZM8/2MOFON/QLF8Y/FW/t

First vote passes -- n.b. the hour of the vote!

News Alert
1:19 AM EST Monday, December 21, 2009

Health-care bill clears crucial procedural vote in Senate, 60 to 40

The Senate cleared a crucial procedural hurdle to bring its health-care bill to the brink of final passage by Christmas Eve. The partisan vote of 60 to 40 shut down a Republican filibuster of the $871 billion package and followed days of tough negotiations with Democratic holdouts.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/KYNZS9/D2HS3/TLYM4O/Y2393O/HSVVO/PJ/t

And breaking news -- final passage.

News Alert
07:15 AM EST Thursday, December 24, 2009

On a vote of 60 to 39, the U.S. Senate passed Thursday morning a landmark health-care bill that extends insurance coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans and begins to refashion Medicare and the private insurance market.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/GWSCIY/BCHXT/CX8UL9/5W6PDJ/SHESD/FW/t

The search was discontinued April 5, 2010. At the time the number of messages found was 9316. The figure shows how they were distributed in time.

When this distribution is compared with the distributions for 'senate health bill' and 'senate bill' you see how depersonalized the commenting is. There are 9316 comments that mention 'reid health bill' but there are 63,201 and 97934 for the searches that mention the senate but do not mention Reid.

The files are reid health bill.xml and reid health bill.txt, which is a tab delimited file that can be read with Excel.