Orchestrated Hooliganism At Town Hall Meetings on Health Care Reform

This is vile.

Having attended my fair share of town hall gatherings, I’ve never seen a more loathsome representation of organized thuggery on the part of the health care lobbies organizing so-called “spontaneous” citizen protests against health care reform.

The group behind all of this, Freedom Works, is an astroturfing group I’ve dealt with before on our municipal broadband issue that I write often about on Stop the Cap! It suckers ordinary citizens into advocating against their own best interests by… well, making stuff up and scaring them. They always hide their true funding backers, pretending to be a “consumer group.”

Municipal broadband isn’t a way for local governments to supply broadband service at the speeds and pricing consumers want, it’s an ‘Obama-engineered socialist takeover of the Internet, as part of his secret campaign for stifling dissent.’  They load mostly retired folks who sit around all day listening to talk radio onto several buses and send them into various places to protest and disrupt.

We endured this nonsense in our successful battle in North Carolina, and those asking some of these people questions quickly learned they had no idea what the specific issues were — they were given basic talking points, a bus ride, and told to chant various slogans which usually had little to do with the issues at hand.

Consumers who actually did understand and support the issue of municipal broadband, who usually lived in the communities affected (unlike so many of the imported protesters), were far more effective with legislators than the talk radio rabble.

Now we’re seeing the same basic thing happening all over again, on a larger scale, with congressional town hall meetings on health care reform being turned into what is starting to resemble a beer hall putsch.

Everyone should have a right to express their opinion and ask questions, but in a respectful manner that recognizes those with opposing views have exactly the same rights.  These meetings need to start with a clear warning that any disruption of this kind should be met with immediate removal of those involved from further participation.  Don’t worry, Mr. or Mrs. elected official, these people weren’t voting for you anyway.

The most vile part of this, of course, is that it is a carefully organized, health care lobby-run and paid for effort, suckering citizens into doing the bidding of health insurance companies that will stop at nothing to grind health care reform to a halt.  They do it with lies, scare rhetoric, and outright nonsense.  The results, encouraged by leaked documents that specifically instruct in disruptive tactics, are the kinds of disruptions that Rep. Dan Maffei (D-New York), a congressman that represents part of suburban Rochester east towards Syracuse, had to endure.

The media rarely exposes the fact these are lobbyist organized protests that involve a tiny minority of people. The majority of constituents support health care reform, but you wouldn’t know that from the media coverage generated with TV-friendly scenes of chaos at town hall meetings like these:

On a personal note, my partner and I have health care insurance from MVP (formerly Preferred Care), one of two major providers serving the Rochester area. Unlike most employers, the company my partner works for doesn’t mask the true cost of health care to its employees. It provides every employee with a base salary and then offers health care coverage at the actual cost imposed by the employer’s provider. For two person coverage in an HMO, with average coverage and prescription drug benefits, with a lower co-pay for doctor visits, we’re talking more than $800 a month. That’s well above a car payment, and within 15 years, at the present rate of growth, will exceed our mortgage payment.

Too many people have no idea what the true cost of health care is in this country. They don’t realize a significant chunk of their salary is sidetracked for a benefits package that hides the actual costs employers pay for covering their employees. Most only pay a small percentage of “cost sharing” towards their insurance coverage, and assume that must represent the true cost of the plan. It absolutely does not. In most cases, for a whole family plan, the costs are above $1000 a month. You may not realize you would normally have a salary $10-12 thousand dollars higher a year, had it not been diverted for benefits.

I am a supporter of single payer health care that builds on and learns from the successes and failures of other nations. Nobody says our system has to be identical to Canada or any other country. This is the United States of America. We can do it better.

Right now, at least a quarter of our health care dollar is handed over to a middleman insurance company that too often rewards itself and its executives with fat pay and bonuses for actually doing very little.

Which makes more sense? Choosing your own doctor, making an appointment yourself, paying a small co-pay, and getting the treatment you need or having to navigate through a bureaucratic health care insurance system that rewards claims denials, limits care, and denies treatment for a myriad of reasons, particularly when it starts getting costly.

The fear mongering about government bureaucrats supposedly making your health care decisions for you completely ignores the fact that is precisely what insurance company executives do right now, and they have a profit motive and shareholders they answer to, not to you. If the government doesn’t do the job the way you want it, throw out the people running it and elect new people. In too many areas, you don’t get that choice with your insurance company.

Remember, I don’t see too many opponents to health care reform demonizing Medicare, nor do I see members of Congress foregoing the excellent government-run health care they receive either.

Of course, single payer doesn’t appear to be in the cards during this first go-around. The “public option” is the best we can appear to do. Only big corporate health care will do anything to kill that as well. That’s because once a public option exists, the veneer of the pricing system we live with today will be torn off, finally allowing consumers some real savings. With one or two commercial insurance companies in the market, wholesale cost reductions threaten profits and revenue, and anger Wall Street and shareholders. Better to incrementally make changes that do not rock the boat (or shareholder value) than to viciously compete for customers.

The precise same argument has been there for municipal broadband projects. When two providers stick consumers with plans that “are good enough for you, so pay us” and refuse to make the upgrades customers want, local governments occasionally decide they’ll commission their own municipal projects that will give the citizens what they want, often at amazing savings. Once consumers find out how much profit is built into the commercial broadband services they’ve endured for years, they get mad — and switch to the municipal system. Then and only then do the private providers suddenly find it within their means to upgrade their networks and actually compete. The winner? Customers. These systems were built from bond issues, not taxpayer dollars, and are built to be sustained with the revenue earned from customers, not taxpayers.

The reaction to both the “public option” and “municipal broadband” is amazingly similar from the private sector. Scare rhetoric, falsehoods, and big fat campaign contributions to elected officials and propaganda campaigns to fool voters help achieve victory for providers and loss for consumers. When consumer friendly reform fails, providers and the lobbyists they hired high-five each other and get back to doing business the usual way, as your wallet gets squeezed more and more.

Let’s not do this all over again. I lost my mom to cancer in 2006, and we had our fair share of battles with insurance companies. When someone is fighting for their life, should even five minutes have to spent arguing with insurance companies whose default answer is always “no” until worn down into saying “yes.”

This isn’t just a Republican or Democrat issue. We have elected officials serving as well-paid prostitutes for the health care industry from both parties. Be they a high ranking Republican taking millions in contributions, or a “blue dog” Democrat that is running to the bank to cash lobbying checks, doing favors for money equals prostitution in my book. Anyone who doesn’t get back to representing their constituents instead of big pharmaceutical and insurance companies needs to find another line of work.