Long-time listener, first-time caller. My wife and I have both been “radicalized” by the election of the Great Orange Shitgibbon and have started the whole donating money and harassing Congresscritters routine. As part of the latter, my wife went to a town hall-type meeting held by our GOP rep Gus Bilirakis in Palm Harbor, FL. Our district is FL-12, which is composed of Pasco Co., the non-Crist northern half of Pinellas and a microscopic sliver of Hillsborough Co. This is a strongly R district and it was even more pro-Trump in November. My impression of Bilirakis to this point was that he is very conservative but not flashy about it; I also consider him a legacy because his father held the seat before him ( I call him The Second of His Name). My wife recorded part of the meeting and based on that and her account, it seems that even in a strong-R district, Reps are catching a lot of heat.
IMO, he did not seem super well-prepared. As my wife’s account makes clear, he came loaded with the usual GOP HC talking points, but again IMO, not with effective ripostes for the rebuttals by the audience. I think the current environment is proving inhospitable for non-swing MoCs who venture into the town-hall circuit. To give the devil his due, he stood and took it; no early bolting for the doors.
For any Kossack in FL-12, The Second of His Name is holding another of these in New Port Richey on 11 Feb 2017 at 10 AM. We are both going armed with signs and pithy, pertinent and pointed questions designed to show how little there is actually there with the GOP and the ACA.
Below is my wife’s account of the meeting and below that will be her video and another one I found via @adamsmithtimes
Thanks for reading and tell me what I’m doing wrong on my first diary!
I went to Gus Bilirakis' healthcare meeting in Palm Harbor 2/4/17. Here is my summary.
There were many people there, maybe 200 or so. The Congressman spoke at first about "the better way" and how the repeal was going to happen and that they were going to take their time to get the new proposal "right". During his talk he mentioned the usual Republican talking points, including high-risk pools, vouchers, refundable tax credits, speeding up FDA and the ability to purchase insurance cross state lines.
I only heard two people speak against ACA. One person had an issue was with Planned Parenthood and government funding for abortions, so this person was obviously not well informed. The other person was a Congressional staffer that said she was locked into purchasing a particular level of the ACA and that premiums were too high. (I believe that was her concern).
There were probably 20 or more people that got the chance to speak and were in favor of keeping the ACA. The majority of the people wanted to keep ACA and fix the issues that it has (No need to reinvent the wheel) or expand Medicare for everyone. People were very wary of starting over with a new plan that was not explicitly written down. (There currently is no bill presented so that we can compare apples to apples). People were totally against vouchers, high-risk pools and tax credits.
The fact that the Congressman said that the Republicans wanted to keep the major aspects of the ACA we were talking about, and we were all saying...well, we already have that in the ACA.
So the summary seemed to be that we have the ACA "in the hand" and we are totally unconvinced that the proposal "in the bush" will be better than what we currently have. So either tweak the ACA to make it better or go Medicare for all.
My wife's video
Another video of the meeting (seems to pick up shortly after my wife's)