Monday, June 1, 2009

Ralph Hall brings the Republican Lie Machine to a "Town Meeting"

On May 27th I witnessed one of the slickest displays of marketing I have ever seen. Marketing is that skill the Bush white house used so skillfully to first confuse voters and then later to fill their heads with propaganda. And for most of the past eight years it worked to further a Reaganistic vision of big bid'ness first and the hell with the rest of society. War was the answer to all international conflicts whether they were real or not. Wall Street was allowed to run hog wild and every other regulatory agency was turned into a frat house for Bush's incompetent buddies. Anyway, back to the meeting. It was titled "Americanize US Health Care Not Socialize". Ignoring the lack of proper grammar, we got the point. It turned out to have been sponsored by the Dallas Association of Health Underwriters-basically insurance sales people who sell plans to employers.

I had never seen Congressman Hall speak and I was impressed. His entire biography was read out loud as his introduction and from most of the folks attending he received a greeting appropriate for a hero. Then he feted Bush who he felt was a "great" President and trashed Obama. That got the crowd aroused with feelings of righteous indignation and anger. Then he turned folksy and went into what I can only describe as a Will Rogers mode telling funny jokes on himself and others just to show he wasn't really a mean person. When he finally spoke at all to the issue at hand, Health-Care Reform he began to paint it as essentially a back door approach to introducing a communist style of socialism to America. A woman behind me stood up to shout that "this isn't a communist country!".

It was at the point that I spoke out loud to interrupt the flow of jingoism and misinformation that was emanating from the stage. I shouted that I objected to the whole premise of calling it a community forum to share information about the details of the coming Health-Care Reform legislation with only representatives of the insurance industry allowed to present. In turn I was shouted back at by the audience and I must say that the congressman was polite. When I asked why other stakeholders in the process of reform weren't invited he just didn't respond to my question. Then several more democratic activists stood up to speak with more direct criticisms, like the perception that the insurance brokers were just afraid of losing their jobs and they were willing to destroy the mission to provide insurance to the poor to save them. Chaos ensued for a short while then the next speaker was introduced.

Reid Rasmussen, a former citizen of Canada, was next to speak. There wasn't much he said that wasn't a distortion of the facts. He intimated that when Hillary Clinton proposed over hauling health care that "he heard" "someone" suggest that her proposal was simply to adopt the Canadian model of a government run health care system. Then without a skip in his rapid fire banter he inferred that President Obama was proposing the same thing. In fact no such thing has been proposed by Obama and no such proposal has been considered in either the Senate's Finance or Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committees where the legislative proposals for heath care reform are being considered.
A proposal has been made to offer a public plan option as part of a wide range of health insurance programs.

In the time I was there the only constructive information I heard was from the second speaker, Ron Dobervich. He spoke about ways in which consumers can be more assertive and informed about their care. He advocated that people keep a copy of all of their medical records, shop for lower prices for procedures and negotiate with physicians about their fees. He gave a very accurate map of the wide variance in prices for health care within a given city. I left at this point but many more brave democrats spoke out that night after me. So what started out to be a marketing plan by insurance salespeople actually turned into a real town meeting.

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