4Senate Finance Committee passes health care bill

Breaking news from The Washington Post about the Senate Finance Committee.

News Alert
02:52 PM EDT Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Health-Care Overhaul Passes Key Hurdle in Senate

Senate Finance Committee approves the $829 billion, 10-year health-care bill sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) with the support of a lone Republican, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/PSLW3N/RIU1I/FY0TBR/E9XNWD/4ZC27/T3/t

They published at 2:52 EDT. I found it at 3:00 CDT. So I was an hour behind in doing the Archivist search. The phrase I searched for was "senate committee health care." I tried several other constructions and this seemed to produce the most results. Archivist immediately found 1500 messages, but they extended back to noon with a message about the intentions of Senator Olympia Snow. So I have all of the after the vote messages.

The search was discontinued April 5, 2010. At the time there were 4280 messages that contained the search phrase. Toward the end messages tended to be about state senates rather than the US senate. The figure shows the distribution over time.

Obviously there was a single spike when the Senate committee was sending the bill to the full Senate. After that it is almost nothing.

The files are senate committee health care.xml and senate committee health care.txt, which is tab delimited file that can be read with Excel.