Who Woulda Thunk It--Germans Less Prolix

Kevin Drum has an interesting post on health care reform which I recommend.  But in the comments, one observer claimed the German health care law was 200 pages.  To which another commenter said:

It´s a bit more than 200 pages by now. Although it includes a chapter dealing with German reunification. In time these paragraphs will be "deleted" again.
As a German my trust in German bureaucracy returned when I discovered that the original "mandatory health insurance law for blue-collar workers" from 1884 consisted of just 13 pages.
At least we managed a 15-20 times increase in pages in 126 years. :)
While of course covering everyone by now...