Last night’s townhall meeting by U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., went off without a serious hitch in Clarkston, thanks in part to good planning by his staff. Event organizers made it clear that they wanted a respectful discussion — “respectful” was a term used throughout the night — and they tried hard to ensure that happened.
The fact that a majority of those attending seemed to support President Obama’s proposal probably also played a role. Opponents lacked the critical mass needed to turn the meeting in another direction. The makeup of the overflow crowd — 500 in the auditorium, another 1,000 or so in a gymnasium watching on closed circuit, and maybe another 500 who showed up but left — reflected the fact that the district is majority Democratic. In addition, reform supporters are now on notice that they were getting out-organized by opponents, and they made sure to show up in numbers.
On the rare occasions when things started to get out of hand, it was usually because Johnson — ignoring his own event rules — began to respond directly to things shouted from the audience rather than to questions by citizens who took the time to wait in line and ask questions. In fact, those who booed most loudly and responded most vocally in the audience generally didn’t take the opportunity to stand and ask questions directly to the congressman. And once the respectful tone of the meeting was set early, more than a few of the more vocal opponents simply left.
To his credit, Johnson recruited a panel of health-care experts across the range of opinion, from strong supporter to strong opponent of the reform effort. But he also wasn’t shy about expressing his own support for the plan, directly criticizing the so-called “blue dog” Democrats in the House who are trying to remove the public option from consideration. That includes two or three of Johnson’s fellow Democrats in the Georgia delegation.
A couple of moments stood out for me:
One father brought his four-month-old son to the meeting, citing him as a victim of health-care rationing occurring under the current system. The boy was born via C-section, and his doctor had recommended that the newborn remain in the hospital beyond the time frame that the family’s health coverage would permit. But the family couldn’t afford to pay for that extra time, so his parents were forced to take him home early, a clear case of insurance bureaucrats interfering with the doctor-patient relationship.
To be honest, such things would occur under health-care reform as well. But it did demonstrate that rationing and interference with doctor’s orders are an integral part of the current system, not some new danger that reform would introduce.
I was also struck by numbers cited by Michael Young, president and CEO of Grady Health Systems, the state’s largest public hospital. In the first eight months of the year, Young said, Grady had seen 67,000 more uninsured patients than it had treated in all of 2008, a fact he attributed to the soaring unemployment rate. That’s pretty scary.
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2009/08/11/a-report-from-hank-johnsons-townhall-meeting/
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