I’m starting to read the health bill Speaker Pelosi unveiled at a pep rally this morning. I feel like I’m back in college. I’ve got something to read. I will read it not because it is interesting, but because reading it will make me a better educated person. It is long. It is very long. It is 1,990 pages long. There is no plot line to move things along. I will need coffee.

Maybe there is part I can skip. Maybe the 20/80 rule will be at work: 20 percent of the pages account for 80 percent of what is important. I’ll figure out the 20 percent I need to read and the 80 percent I can skim.

I turn to the bill. I read the table of contents. Ah yes, it is “comprehensive” health-care reform. That means all open issues in health-care policy are fair game. And I immediately identify one part that will not require close scrutiny to figure out how this legislation will shape the future of health care in America: the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.

It takes 351 pages to reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. A quick look finds such provisions as Congress providing that nothing here is to “preclude the Soboba Band of Mission Indians . . . from being provided with sanitation facilities.” And there might be a fairly sweet deal for someone in the “North Dakota and South Dakota as contact health service delivery area” provision, but in the effort to figure out comprehensive health-care reform, I think I can say I’ve read enough.

This is better than the 20/80 rule. The Indian Health Service budget is around $3.4 billion a year. That’s less than 1 percent of total health-care spending in the U.S. To reform this part of the health-care system takes 18 percent of the pages in the bill. Much better than the 20/80 rule.

So it is 351 pages down, 1,639 to go.

– Hanns Kuttner is a visiting fellow at Hudson Institute.