Just in time for Halloween, yet another incarnation of Democrat health care reform arrived with a thud Thursday. A nearly 2,000-sheet, 19-pound, keep-small-animals-and-kids-away thunderous thud.

The most long-winded version yet, Pelosi Care is another unwieldy, likely-to-be-unread tome assembled behind closed doors to completely reshape the one-sixth of the U.S. economy known as health care in ways we have yet to discover.

Is all this really necessary to cover the, by some estimates, 12 to 15 million Americans who can't afford insurance and don't now qualify for Medicaid?

As for the other stated goal of reform -- containing costs -- who reasonably thinks the government can do that, given its out-of-control spending in every other area of human existence? And who thinks the answer is a 19-pound manual?

And do you really believe Barack Obama when he says he won't sign a bill that adds a dime to the deficit?

More and more, this repeated rollout of divinely inspired Health Care Commandments from Mount Sinai is looking like either the most insane legislative exercise in history or the most ingenious sleight-of-hand ever. It seems to be more of a power grab by Washington -- complete with a new government-run health care system to compete unfairly with the private sector -- than any genuine effort to plug holes in the health-care system.

"It runs more pages than War and Peace," writes Politico.com, "has nearly five times as many words as the Torah, and its tables of contents alone run far longer than this story.

"The House health care bill unveiled Thursday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. With an estimated 10-year cost of $894 billion, that comes out to about $2.24 million per word."

Access to the "mission accomplished" style press conference announcing the monstrosity was strictly controlled -- so if there was someone with a mind to ask House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if she'd read her own bill, he or she wasn't allowed close.

Not to worry. It's supposedly an amalgam of earlier bills, so, "It's almost a complete certainty that we have already discussed and debated almost every element that's in this bill," said Rep. Steve Rothman, D-N.J.

Whew! We feel better!

What an insane waste of trees. Especially considering the fact that Democrats seem bent on ignoring any ideas from the opposition party. This area's own Rep. Paul Broun, for example, has his own market-based plan he calls the "patient option." Broun told us this past week he's suggested to his Democratic colleagues that they pick and choose the elements of his plan they like and take credit themselves. Cue the crickets.

Or better yet, drop the Pelosi Care monster on them.