A Little Bit of Shame in the Health Care Bill

I don't know if you've heard, but the Democrats seem to have successfully hoodwinked most of America into allowing poor people to systematically harvest our organs. On top of that, they deviously exploited a loophole that allowed them to pass a bill with a horribly un-arbitrary simple majority, instead of the happily more nuanced 60%.
I haven't been on pins and needles following this whole drama along the way, so thankfully the NY Times site has a couple of handy "interactive graphics" that explain the House and Senate bills, though beware the caveat that as far as I can tell neither says anything about death panels.
The one that focuses more on the differences between the bills contain a delightful little passage detailing a House bill addition:
MEDICARE PAYROLL TAX: Would impose an additional 3.8 percent tax on capital gains, dividends, interest and other “unearned income.”
Heh. "Unearned income." You can argue all you want about the responsibility to the robustness of the overall U.S. economy and the admirable foresight required to actually receive capital gains, dividends, or interest, but you have to enjoy that someone has labeled these as "unearned." I agree that probably these incomes shouldn't be penalized because they are there to exploit by those capable to exploit them, but I wholly support calling a spade a spade here. Those incomes are not actually earned, they are exploited. It's like finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk. "Unearned."
Awesome, which leads me to my other curiosity: who is responsible for those quotation marks around "unearned income?" Was it someone at the Times? I doubt it. Was it Democratic congressmen, who actually wrote the phrase into the legislation? Maybe. I'd like to know though, because it was a very deliberate choice.

(On a more serious note, as with anything debated in a political setting or with political consequences, there are multiple very intelligent arguments to made for or against either side. It costs too much, it's socialism, we're behind the rest of the world, government is too big already, the current system is broken anyway, etc etc. But there is one simple immediate effect of this that I think can't be ignored no matter your stance: 32 million of the 54 million uninsured Americans would gain coverage. Isn't that really the most important thing? "I'll have to pay more for prescriptions, I might have to wait longer to see a doctor, I won't be able to pick and choose what I want all the time," and on and on. So what if the new plan isn't perfect? It's a huge and difficult issue and will take decades to successfully implement true changes, so you have to start somewhere. It would be easy for me or you to take a principled stance in favor of more thought or more discussion or more discretion on this matter (and we'd almost always be right). We can afford to do this. We can waltz into a hospital and be treated at little cost to ourselves almost whenever we want, but there are a lot of people who can't (54 million, evidently), and those are the people who probably ought to be considered first.)