Shea-Porter talks health care in Manchester
I attended Rep. Carol Shea-Porter’s health care “town hall” meeting in the Norris Cotton Federal Building in Manchester on Saturday, and the most salient point from the event was that I didn’t learn anything about health care or the reform bill Shea-Porter supports, and I don’t think anyone else did, either.
Rain kept most of the protesters home, but a few hardy souls turned out.
The real excitement was inside the little room on the third floor. I counted 100 chairs for attendees. One guy was in his own wheelchair, so that made for an audience of 101. Shea-Porter claimed that was a large crowd for a town hall meeting.
“This is twice the size that we normally have,” she said when someone complained about the room size. “And it’s exactly the same size as other members of Congress have done.”
She said she chose the federal building because “we looked for a larger venue” and, she added, “We wanted it to be safe.”
The larger venue excuse is pure bunk. Manchester’s public schools could have provided Shea-Porter with a far larger venue. New York Rep. Dan Maffei held a town hall meeting with 400 people in a Syracuse middle school auditorium. Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., has held several town hall meetings where hundreds of people showed up. Boyd said a few weeks ago that he’d never seen town hall crowds this large.
Shea-Porter knew darned well that interest in these meetings would be significantly higher than normal. She knew that a crowd of several hundred would not be unrealistic. Judd Gregg got away with a smaller meeting in Salem because he’s a Republican and people want to vent their anger not at Republicans but at Democrats who are pushing this legislation. Size had nothing to do with her choice of venue. She chose the federal building for one reason only: it has metal detectors. She was scared to death that someone might bring a gun.
The Democratic Party did a decent job stocking the room with reform supporters who would ask softball questions or simply sit in silence and take a seat from someone who might be an opponent. Sens. Betsi DeVries and Lou D’Allesandro sat beside each other, taking up two percent of the seats right there. Some supporters admitted to living outside of the 1st District, though none admitted to being from out of state.
Still, probably a quarter of the crowd consisted of vocal opponents. One, a big guy named Carl Tomanelli of Londonderry, stood up and started shouting at a woman in a purple “I’m a health care voter” T-shirt when, about 20 minutes before the meeting started, she began handing out “I’m a health care voter” stickers. Tomanelli complained that the stickers would let Shea-Porter know the friendlies in the audience so she could call only on them. A police officer came over and quieted everyone down and said he’d take anyone outside who did that again.
Shea-Porter strode in a few minutes late and established the ground rules. Everyone who wanted to ask a question had been allowed to draw a ticket. A local Boy Scout would pull tickets out of a bucket and read the numbers, assuring a random selection of questioners. Good move. Shea-Porter would let her invited guests — two women with personal stories of health insurance problems — speak first, then others could ask questions.
Someone demanded the Pledge of Allegiance, which Shea-Porter had already planned to do, and after that the meeting got underway.
The first guest, an 84-year-old woman, spoke, and people heckled her. When she went over her two-minute allotment of time, people demanded that she sit down. Shea-Porter, who had previously said everyone, including guests, would be limited to two minutes, tried to give the poor woman more time by saying, “This is a real story from a real senior, though!” Apparently she didn’t think anyone else in the room was a real person with a real story.
The heckling continued through the next speaker’s story and through Shea-Porter’s opening remarks. At this point it was clear that some people came with no intention of listening. They just wanted to disrupt the meeting and attack Shea-Porter.
Shea-Porter gave her standard points for pushing the type of reform she supports.
Defending the provision to require that everyone have health insurance, she again brought up the 25-year-old who chooses to buy fun things instead of insurance. “If you buy insurance, it might cut into the cds you buy, the car… You’re paying your premiums, they should pay their premiums.”
After saying that everyone would be required to buy insurance, she made the bizarre claim, as she has before, that “nobody’s making you do anything.” I think she meant that the government won’t force people to join the public option plan or change your current insurance. But that’s meaningless. The government doesn’t have to force you to join a particular insurer for you to lose the coverage you now have. All it has to do is pass tons of mandates dictating that insurers offer everything under the sun, and your insurance will change because your carrier will not be able to offer the same coverage it offers now. Which is exactly what she proposes.
She said forcing insurers to cover preventive care will reduce costs. “Preventive care, which really we’ve never tried in this country, will be one of our biggest cost savings,” she said. Incredibly, she made this statement just three weeks after the Congressional Budget Office concluded that “the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.”
She’s simply ignoring facts that contradict her prepared sales pitch.
She says of the plan she supports, “First of all, we’re going to introduce competition.” But there’s already competition in health insurance between for-profit and non-profit providers. The bill she supports would create an insurance “exchange,” which she likens to taking your pick from a bowl. But to get into the exchange, insurers would have to offer the exact same types of coverage. It’s like competition in the Soviet Union. You get any choice you want, but you have to pick from the strictly limited options the government offers. That’s not competition, and it’s not choice.
Asked about Medicare, Shea-Porter comically undermined her argument without even realizing she was doing it, just as President Obama did in Portsmouth. She defended the government-run “public option” and her position that Medicare would not be harmed by saying, “The government does a very, very good job with Medicare.” Moments later, she said, “One of the things this bill is going to do is extend Medicare solvency for five years.”
If the government does such a great job with Medicare, why is it expected to be insolvent in seven years?
Shea-Porter didn’t win any converts for the same reason President Obama probably didn’t win any when he came to Portsmouth. She repeated her prepared talking points, but the contradictions between what she said and what the effects of the bill would actually be remained glaringly wide.
Not only did she refute herself, as with the Medicare statements, but she was refuted and tripped up by questioners. One person explained how the bill she supports would raise Medicaid enrollment without fully funding it, thus leaving New Hampshire to cover half the cost of every new enrollee. He asked if she would guarantee that she wouldn’t support a final bill that would raise state costs. She dodged the question.
Another countered her previous statement about tort reform. She claimed that tort reform in Texas accomplished “nothing.” A woman in the back read from a column by Texas Gov. Rick Perry in which he recited a laundry list of improvements from tort reform. She backtracked, saying, “What I did say was that premiums for individuals and families didn’t go down.” No, she said the result was “nothing.” The woman busted her.
Near the end, things got lively as opponents vented their frustrations. They called Shea-Porter a liar and challenged anyone who asked a friendly question or talked back to them. Carl Tomanelli stood and confronted a young man in an “I’m a health care voter” T-shirt and asked him if he was even from New Hampshire. At this, the police grabbed Tomanelli, told him he’d been warned, and escorted him out.
I asked the young man in the purple shirt, Derek Lemire, age 24, where he was from. “I’m not going to tell you where I live,” he said.
By the time it was over, those who had fears and concerns were left with the same fears and concerns. Some of them came up to her afterward to try to address them. She looked at them for a few seconds, then walked away.
The woman in this next picture, Theresa Petrello of Manchester, said she was a registered independent who has voted for a Republican only once in her life. She was really upset with Shea-Porter for supporting a reform that would give the government so much power. Shea-Porter listened for a few seconds, then turned and walked out without saying a word, though Petrello said she’d voted for Shea-Porter and was very concerned about the bill.
There were at least 17 police and security officers at the meeting, which is about one for every five audience members. I didn’t see Shea-Porter motion to the officers to take Tomanelli out. I saw the officers come over and tell him, “You were warned,” which was true. He had been warned, and he got up and started shouting and getting in people’s personal space anyway. Not sure that really rose to the level of having him ejected, though. The officers certainly didn’t have to grab him. By the time they got to him, he’d already picked up his jacket and was submissively heading toward them. He said (I’m paraphrasing) “You don’t have to put your hands on me, I’m coming.” But they grabbed his arms anyway and tugged him out of the room.
It really didn’t seem as if anyone was listening to anyone else the entire time. Shea-Porter gave her prepared talking points, dodged questions and answered others with more talking points even if they didn’t directly answer the question. But some opponents did no better. Asked whether she supported a single-payer health plan, Shea-Porter gave quite a clear answer. She said she supported a Medicare for all single-payer plan that would be funded by the government but provided by private insurers. Her answer was very clear, but several people accused her of dodging the question and they kept asking it. She answered it twice, but they weren’t really listening.
The most the meeting did was get Shea-Porter on the record some more, get one man tossed out, and further entrench Shea-Porter’s position. Opponents who don’t listen and just attack don’t realize that they’re hurting their own cause. They aren’t changing her mind; they’re causing her to dig in even harder. Both sides missed a real opportunity here to engage in a much more fruitful discussion.
