I admire the voice actors who volunteer many hours reading the entire health care bill — see NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/health/policy/14audio.html:

Listen to the Health Care Bill Read by Professional Voices

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

Published: September 14, 2009

About 60 voice actors volunteered to record the proposed health care bill, H.R. 3200, a 1,017-page doorstop. The reading, available free at hearthebill.org, clocks in just shy of 24 hours.

BUT….Using text to voice technologies, I can easily turn the entire bill into human voice.  While it may not be as nice as the voice actors’ voice, but it’s pretty close to a real human speaking.  And I’m quite sure that one can save many hours of voice editing by using machine generated voice.

A few weeks ago, the smart Dr. Sanjay Gupta appeared in CNN, and looking perplexed as he admitted that he found the bill not clear in many areas after he personally plowed through the 1000 over pages.

I guess when we try to understand something complex, our human nature will, by default, “play back” and “read back” any difficult statements. We’ll read over and over again until we get that aha moment or “OK, this must be what it means!”.  This is like reading and signing a legal document.  We want to know exactly what we will get ourselves into.  This requires both subject matter knowledge and patience to think and reason the relations of actions, probablity of events and consequences.

Turning the text to voice, without any decision aid tools, probably will not make this bill any easier to understand. 

Thanks but no thanks, I will not ipod the health care bill for my gym workout, I may mess up my steps.