How long to read the bill?

I actually know Bonnie James, quoted in this article, who teaches speed reading.

"We read the entire House version when it came out in July. Certainly, at just over 1,000 pages, it was long. At times, it was exceedingly boring. We took frequent Diet Coke breaks. Day passed into night, then day, then night, then ... memory fails. We're sorry to report that we didn't think to time how long we took.

So to explore Bachmann's comment, we wanted a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much time it might take the average person to literally read the text of the bill. A computer program told us the House bill weighed in at 163,000 words. The average adult, meanwhile, can read passages aloud at an average rate of 154 words per minute, according to a 2003 measurement of basic adult literacy by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. At that rate, the average person would need about 18 hours to read the bill aloud. So if you had the three days Pelosi would guarantee, you'd only have to spend six hours per day reading the bill.

Most people, though, can read faster when they're reading silently. The estimates we found for adult readers ranged from 200 to 400 words per minute. At those rates, a person could conquer the bill in seven to 13 hours.

Let's say that you're a better-than-average reader, though -- even a speed reader. We spoke with Bonnie James, the president of Advanced Reading Concepts, an organization that teaches speed reading to students at weekend courses and in corporate settings. James said that graduates of her classes can read, on average, anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 words per minute. At that rate, you could read the bill in about two or three hours.

But those times would be for someone who had a general understanding of the material and what it contained, James said.

"A trained speed reader, looking for specific things, could probably go through it at 1,200 words a minute," James said. "But you don't just open the bill and then read it really, really fast. You need to be looking for information, looking for certain words. You don't just go into a trance." Polifact.com