I’m not diarying on the Clifton Park Town Hall because other Kossaks – Schaeffer, Devtob, and Lulu were there. Might have been more Kossaks, but couldn’t tell. I drove over to Petersburg to attend the second Town Hall Meeting held by Scott Murphy.
NY-20 Town Hall Meeting, Petersburg, NY
I’m not diarying on the Clifton Park Town Hall because other Kossaks – Schaeffer, Devtob, and Lulu were there. Might have been more Kossaks, but couldn’t tell. I drove over to Petersburg to attend the second Town Hall Meeting held by Scott Murphy.
Petersburg is a sparsely populated rural town on the New York/ Massachusetts border, near Williamstown and Bennington, VT. Residents are mostly small farmers and small business owners. They’re conservative with a small "c" believing people should ‘work hard, take care of yourself and neighbors, don’t take hand-outs.’ The townspeople belong to the NRA, but they eat what they kill.
The meeting was held in a hall in the center of Petersburg village.
About 60-70 attended, many of them senior citizens. There were no teabaggers, and no shouting. Representative Murphy gave his standard town hall speech and then threw the meeting over to questions. People stood in line to ask questions.
The questions reflected the general opposition to health care reform as too expensive, too much debt, will drive private insurance companies out of business, government run business is not a good idea, the government runs too much as it is. "There’s going to be rationing’, ‘they’re going to cut Medicare. A couple of speakers said that Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and President Obama were going to drive the country into socialism. There was one "we’ve got to take back America,’ which drew an applause. Most of the negative questions about health care drew an applause. Then a woman talked about a friend of hers that died of cancer because she didn’t have health care and didn’t see a doctor until it was too late. She said she was worried about her daughter who would soon graduate from college and not have the money for health care. THAT drew a large applause too.
Another complaint was that senior citizens didn’t get a cost of living raise this year, but people on welfare got their raise.(Highly unlikely.) Their social security doesn’t go up but their bills do. Scott explained that this was because the CPI went down when oil prices drop, so there was no COLA this year. Still, I can understand that seniors would see this as the first step towards cutting social security and Medicare benefits to pay for health care.
Several people believed that health care reform would be used to provide health insurance to illegal aliens. Murphy pointed out the immigration bill that both Kennedy and McCain had worked on that had not been passed –This is a bill sponsored by 2 senators whose views could not be more different. Scott explained what the bill would do to resolve immigration issues.
The meeting closed around 1:30 and people headed back from whence they came. Murphy won’t get too many votes in this solidly town, but he clearly won their respect.