If anything should alarm you about the $940 billion health care reform bill narrowly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Sunday night, it’s the horrifying fact almost no one seems to have read the thing, a fact that House Minority Leader John Boehner stressed in his impassioned address minutes before the big vote.

That’s hardly reassuring when you acknowledge this largely unexamined Pandora’s box of health care surprises will impact what economists say is a sixth of our gross domestic product. It will almost certainly spur insurance premiums, cause doctor shortages, cripple small businesses, raise taxes and change the very quality of care and access to doctors we cherish. Journalists will likely spend weeks, if not months, digging some of the surprises and backroom deals out of this bill.

Yet hope prevails. The very defects in this bill are what lawmakers on both the left and right, plus our high courts, must focus on in the months and years to come. There are grand constitutional questions to be addressed. For instance, is it really constitutional to demand that every American buy health insurance or face a fine? Is it right that Congress can dole out tax breaks to some states but not others? Expansion of Medicaid eventually could demand that Texas cough up several billion more dollars. Other states, though, were cut breaks.

Some deals will be scrutinized by voters, including those who will judge the anti-abortion Democrats, who at the very last minute caved in to party leaders, betraying their alleged concerns about federal dollars going to pay for abortions. You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to know that an executive order from the White House, supposedly negating this part of health care legislation, does not trump law.

If there’s anything even remotely positive about all this, it’s that we have been treated to an unvarnished, yearlong lesson of democracy in action. And if it hasn’t been pretty, it’s possibly because Americans have so seldom been swept up by an issue they care as much about as health care.

Consider this lesson, then, a bracing one. Learn by it. Whether you’re for or against the health package passed Sunday, it’s proof that you must be engaged in the electoral process. An informed and discriminating electorate that is vocal can make a difference. The reality of all this, however, is that it may take time.

In this case, voters will render their judgment in the fall and again in the 2012 presidential election. The only thing they may have to fight in the meantime is their own short memories and the fact they may grow so disenchanted by the political system that they turn off entirely to the ways of power and government. And that would be a tragic loss for the nation.