Democrats face hostile homecomings from health care reform critics
Health care reform critics get tougher at district meetings
By Janet Hook
Tribune Newspapers
August 6, 2009
WASHINGTON - An effigy of Rep. Frank Kratovil was hung outside his office on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin was shouted down by angry constituents. Rep. Tim Bishop of New York had such a raucous experience with critics on Long Island that he is avoiding town hall meetings for more manageable settings.
The spark for the political firestorm surrounding these lawmakers has been President Barack Obama's effort to overhaul the health care system. The debate has gotten especially ugly now that Congress has adjourned for a monthlong summer recess, and critics have mobilized in force.
The intensity of the opposition is a pointed reminder of how hard it will be for Democrats to sell voters on a broad reworking of the health care system, even though they hold commanding majorities in Congress.
At the same time that Democrats are trying to show the need for change, powerful special interests are deep into a campaign to portray the legislation, which is still being written, as a government takeover of health care that will disrupt voters' established relationships with doctors.
Democrats say the disruption of lawmakers' meetings does not reflect broad public opposition to their health care plans. Rather, they say, it is arising from an orchestrated effort by conservative groups, GOP leaders and "astroturf" organizations that claim to represent grass-roots voters but are backed by special interests.
This is hardly the first time that lawmakers' town hall meetings have been swamped with emotional outpourings during a congressional recess. In past years, lawmakers got an earful about cracking down on illegal Immigration and on former President George W. Bush's plan for overhauling Social Security.
Still, the rancor this year is noteworthy.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, ran into a group opposed to the Democrats' proposed health care plan Saturday when he tried to hold a constituent meeting at a grocery in Austin. Protesters surrounded him and followed him into the parking lot chanting, "Just say no!"
Protest signs included one with a picture of Doggett sporting devil's horns.
When Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., appeared in Philadelphia on Sunday with Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary, the pair were heckled by people accusing Specter of not reading the legislation.
When the senator explained that Congress sometimes has to make judgments "very fast," the crowd erupted with derision. Sebelius was hooted down when she tried to defend members of Congress as hardworking.
Americans for Prosperity, a free-market advocacy group, has been leading a conservative coalition that has urged people to confront lawmakers at meetings with questions, such as whether they have read all 1,000-plus pages of the bill.
Kagen, the Wisconsin lawmaker, could hardly get a word in edgewise when he tried to talk about health reform at a constituent meeting. Bishop, of New York, faced such an unruly crowd at a town hall gathering that he has since sought alternative settings to talk to constituents.
Some groups who oppose the Democratic legislation say they want their members to attend the lawmakers' district meetings, but not as a disruptive force.
"We never condone disruptive behavior," said Amy Menefee, spokeswoman for Americans for Prosperity, which claims 700,000 members. "We always tell people to be civil and respectful."
Democratic leaders are warning rank-and-file members of Congress to beware of such efforts; Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., warned his colleagues against getting a "sucker punch" on the issue.
"These are screamers, not rational debaters," said Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "Regular constituents are not getting heard. They shut down any other voice than their own."
Still, there is evidence of genuine public opposition to the Democrats' health plans.
Leslie Kirkeide, a sales representative in Lake Forest, Ill., said in an interview that the concern about the legislation -- and the uncertainty about what it will entail -- is not just a manufactured political force. "People are very upset," she said. "This is the biggest thing Congress has ever tackled."
Organizers of the opposition have "touched a nerve" as the public has started focusing on the potential impact on lives and pocketbooks, said Robert Blendon, a professor of public policy at the Harvard School of Public Health.
"Over time, will my family be better off or worse off?" Blendon said people are asking. "Will it be helping me as well as helping uninsured people?"
A late-July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that support for Obama's health plan had dropped: 42 percent called it a bad idea, while 36 percent said it was a good idea. In mid-June, opinion had been about evenly divided.
What's your take on all this?
Uriel
Well, I don't know that I would go so far as to say that health care is a basic human right, because the Law of Nature is is more like you have a basic right to get sick and die, and that's a smaller subset of the Law of Entropy, which says that you have the right -- no, the duty -- to eventually break down into chaos.
But I digress. On a political level, I don't see anything wrong or unAmerican about extending the right to free health care to all -- after all, the constitution gives you the right to a free lawyer -- so why not a doctor? (Granted, in the 18th C. your doctor may have been slightly more likely to do you harm than your lawyer, which is probably why it didn't make it onto the books way back when.)
And currently, we aren't even touching the idea of FREE health care with a ten foot pole. All they are discussing is the possibility of allowing people to BUY government-sponsored insurance if they can't get it elsewhere. And maybe to force private insurance to quit cherry-picking who they will cover and for which procedures and therapies. Forcing THEM to be more fair or get the fuck out seems VERY American to me -- following in the hallowed footsteps of labor reform and social discrimination legislation.
Heckling is a sign that the opposition fears even the specter of a rational debate on the subject. They just want to shout the idea down before it can be explored in front of the public.
What's scary is how little people know about true issues these days, and how easily they are led by straw man arguments. i'll give you a creepy example that just happened to me: I got a marketing survey call that was obviously about trying to figure out how to design a strategic marketing campaign about fighting global warming. It wasn't even the actual campaign -- it was just trying to tease out what catchphrases or statistics people would respond to most favorably or unfavorably, so they would know how to tailor the language and the stats for the real deal. I was asked whether I liked the term "CO2" or the term "carbon dioxide" better. I was asked how I felt about carbon dioxide -- for or against it? favorable or unfavorable toward it? -- as various statements were read to me. That this was patently absurd -- CO2 is a naturally occurring gas that certainly has its good and bad points -- was not the point. The point was to figure out how to make CO2 look sexy to people. To say that it was "green' because plants need it to live, and therefore capping CO2 emissions could only be detrimental to the earth. They even went so far as to point out that water vapor is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Which is very true -- I learned that in astronomy, when we talked about the runaway greenhouse effects of Venus's atmosphere, which are attributable to water vapor. The fact that conditions on Venus will never be reproduced on Earth because of a number of other factors might be relevant here, but I am sure that this campaign will only focus on the PART of the truth that is relevant to their argument -- and people won't know enough to fill in the other parts of the truth that aren't being fed to them.
And you know what? I don't know how people get through 12 years of school without learning anything about science. I went to the same public school system that gets derided in the international media all the time, and I got a kick-ass education. Science was included in the curriculum every single year, from biology to geology to astronomy, etc. Physics and chemistry were offered, if not required, at the upper end. I learned all kinds of things that are relevant to public policy, economics, and health management in K-12 science classes. Yet some asshole is going to spring a ridiculous campaign on how green CO2 emissions really are and how they should be encouraged in the name of freakin' agriculture and millions of morons are going to buy it.
And since this is the level of "rational exploration of ideas" that we often get as the American public, i really fear for health care reform. The hecklers represent the portion of the population that willfully would rather not know more than be prised away from their beliefs and convictions. They don't even want to be EXPOSED to ideas that might make them even consider other avenues of thought. They would rather shout it down at the outset and make it all go away than look at both sides of an issue -- or let anyone else look at it, either.
Frightening.
Patrix
Health care is a basic human right and it does take a tough man with a strong will to clear all the political obstacles. I'm not skeptical of Obama's will, but I just don't think his plan will work.
greg in noord-frankrijk
I've heard that neocons etc compared Obama to Hitler because Barack is against the "freedom" for the rich to grow richer by escaping basic solidarity towards the poor. Apparently, they also had the average US people believe that bureaucrats were going to decide who'd be entitled to be properly taken care of — and live — and who should not.
How is that people are actually swallowing such rubbish after what they already got → the WMD hoax about Iraq etc ?
Elaine
greg in noord-frankrijk wrote:
I've heard that neocons etc compared Obama to Hitler because Barack is against the "freedom" for the rich to grow richer by escaping basic solidarity towards the poor. Apparently, they also had the average US people believe that bureaucrats were going to decide who'd be entitled to be properly taken care of — and live — and who should not.
How is that people are actually swallowing such rubbish after what they already got → the WMD hoax about Iraq etc ?
I'm pretty sure, though I have no proof to back up my claim, that most of these neo-fascists who have hijacked the whole debate regarding healthcare -- thereby taking the very concept of democracy hostage -- live very insular lives, aren't very well-read, have done very little research on the matter, and base their political worldview on the propaganda they hear on FOX news, Rush Limbaugh, and other conservative news outlets. They are not open to hearing other points of views, and will dismiss anything counter to their belief system as "liberal", "socialist", "communist" or in the words of that intellectually-challenged walking billboard of blind ambition, Sarah Palin, "downright evil." I am also convinced that racism and classicism play a huge part in their vociferous determination to shoot down any dialogue on universal healthcare.
I'm not chastising all conservatives, mind you. I'm sure there are many in the Republican Party who are open to the idea of at least engaging in healthy debate, but very few of them are willing to speak out against the more vitriolic members of their Party for fear of losing their constituent base. Others, I believe, choose to remain silent, b/c they wish to see Obama and the Democratic Party go down in flames.
