On Thursday night, I went to Rep. Joe Courtney's town hall in Woodstock, CT with this document in hand, and it helped change what started as a completely disruptive meeting into a contentious but functional one where the public option side clearly won.
To provide a bit of context, I posted a diary earlier this week called The Ten Health Care Talking Points EVERY DEM MUST REPEAT, a diary that was just as much about the sequence of talking points as the points themselves; while it made the rec list, a few folks at that time correctly raised criticisms that only parts of the data (the more obscure stuff) were fully sourced, instead of everything being sourced. Despite my efforts, I couldn't seem to edit that diary at the time for technical reasons - but in the days that followed, I revised and updated my information with full sourcing, formatted it all to fit nicely onto a one page Word Document, and printed out a whole bunch of copies to bring to the town hall with me.
Below the fold, a brief recap of the top ten (now fully sourced) along with an account of my first town hall experience...
The Ten Health Care Talking Points EVERY DEM MUST REPEAT
- When you need life-saving care, private insurance companies only profit by denying you and letting you die. If you have paid your premiums on time all your life, you're as likely to be dropped by your private insurance company when you need life-saving care as you are to get treated. A public option gives you a lifeline.
- Private insurance companies are spending over a million dollars a day to kill the public option by inventing phony citizen groups, and trying to scare the elderly about euthanasia and pro-lifers with abortion; they know the only way to kill reform is to get people of good conscience fighting each other over misinformation, while they laugh all the way to the bank. They don't think very highly of our intelligence.
- We pay more than any other country to be 24th in life expectancy: while the average Canadian family spends less than $2000 a year on health care with no waiting periods for life-saving care, the average American family spends $16,800 a year, waiting for private insurance companies to approve life-saving treatments.
- Fourteen thousand Americans lose their health insurance every day; over forty-six million are currently uninsured.
- Eighteen thousand Americans DIE each year due to lack of health care: THAT'S 50 A DAY.
- Nearly two-thirds of American personal bankruptcies are related to health care costs.
- Businesses - particularly small businesses - cannot afford to provide health insurance for their employees under the current employer based private insurance system, and will be forced to either drop their coverage or go out of business unless a public option is passed.
- One-sixth of all our government spending is on health care, twice as much as any other country spends out of its budget. Our nation pays $2.5 trillion for care costing $912 billion.
- Every independent estimate says the public option will save us money, from saving 150 billion dollars (CBO) to saving 265 billion dollars (Commonwealth). The Congressional Budget Office estimates the current bill in the House would actually leave a 6 billion dollar surplus
- So - if you'd rather spend more taxpayer money, bankrupt businesses, AND pay $16,800 a year for your family's private insurance coverage in exchange for a policy that can be dumped the second you actually need it, then the current system is great for you. If you'd rather spend less, wait less, have less of a chance of dying, and want to remove the corporate bureaucrat from between you and your doctor, then a public option is the way to go. Right now, even if you're lucky enough not to be dropped by your provider when you need urgent medical care, your private insurance company can overrule your doctor's advice for life-saving treatment and only offer to cover something cheaper; a public option would remove that middleman and leave these decisions where they belong, between the patient and doctor.
Any elected Democrat making the case for health care, whether going to a town meeting, speaking on the public airwaves, or debating behind closed doors should know the order of these talking points in and out. They're quick, they're effective, and when communicated in sequence, they're bulletproof. Most importantly, they kill every Republican talking point while staying consistently on the offensive.
Notes: The numbers are purposefully lowballed/rounded down in order to avoid a subsequent conversation devolving into bickering that distracts from the main points being made. In that spirit, the one big change from the earlier posting of this top ten list is the $16,800 figure being added as the average American family's health care costs, instead of a higher estimate. Lastly, the statistic about the average Canadian family paying less than $2000/yr is based on a single Canadian paying $40 a month, times 12 months ($480/yr) times a family of four ($1920/yr).
Now, to Thursday night's town hall... this was the first one I ever attended, and I am SO GLAD that I went. Woodstock is a very rural and sparsely populated town in the northeast corner of CT, and one of the redder parts of a fairly progressive district; it's a very beautiful place, as was the view in the room the packed town hall was held in (350 people). As my fiancee and I went in, we met a young lady who was very kind and polite; it turned out that she was in the "against the public option" camp, arguing that people should pay for themselves. However, she seemed open minded to my point of view, to my surprise, and when she asked me about my viewpoint and I told her about the flyers I'd brought, she asked to take one and began to read it. For the purposes of this diary, I will refer to her as Reasonable Conservative (for now at least).
The civility that she reflected was a unique attribute among most of those at the meeting who opposed a public option. From the first podium speaker's mention of his first statistic (60 million uninsured), the loud barking and braying began: "THAT'S NOT TRUE". The speaker's next line from his written statement, clearly anticipating some of this, went into how civil discourse is necessary - and people applauded with no booing - but just seconds the yellers continued heckling speaker after speaker at the podium, stopping them from talking for several seconds while many of us firmly turned back to them and said "quiet!" However, as soon as it stopped it would start again. The last lady who spoke at the podium was just a regular citizen trying to talk about her family history on the farm, and her relatives getting sick and dying, and the problems they'd faced under the current health care system; she was nice, genuine, and completely apolitical in tenor - and she got the worst of it. The yellers ate her up, saying things so insensitive ("GET OVER IT!" - hands down the ugliest thing of the ugly things I heard all night, given the moment it was said) that she eventually got frazzled and lost her place, nearly beginning to cry; I can't communicate how cruel they were with their "so what" attitude to everything she said - I felt SO bad for this poor woman.
That was enough for me. The first comment/question the audience was allowed to pose to the Congressman, I was fortunate enough to be given the floor. This is what I said:
"I've been an independent voter most of my life, I've lived in this district for most of my life, and I've never been to a town hall before, but I'm here because I am appalled that the private insurance companies are spending 1.4 million dollars a day to kill the public option, paying off and bussing in phony citizen groups; the insurance companies know the only way to kill reform is to get people of good conscience fighting, while they laugh all the way to the bank. They don't think very highly of our intelligence.
"But I think that this year - this time - they're wrong."
The majority of the room erupted in applause, with only silence and no booing coming from the stunned wingnuts.
For the rest of the meeting, they still did make SOME noise and still talked back when they heard things they didn't like - but no longer loudly and abrasively enough to disrupt the meeting and interrupt anyone who spoke in favor of a public option to the point where the person had to stop talking. Their cover was blown. The meeting remained contentious, with the passion, drama, and - I must admit - entertainment value more reminiscient of a wrestling event than what one would picture as a local Democratic party town hall in sparsely populated area - but a contentious meeting and a dysfunctional meeting are worlds apart, and indeed at opposite ends; one is vibrant democracy, the other is not democracy at all.
GO TO THESE TOWN HALL MEETINGS AND CALL THEM OUT, using the same type of language, particularly including the "insurance companies don't think very highly of our intelligence"; they are not prepared to be called out, and it throws them off their game. There was no doubt leaving that meeting that the public option side in the room had won the debate, and that the wingers actually only represented 25-30% of the room - but the perception could have easily gone the other way had the meeting continued the way it started, with the minority sounding so loud it seemed to be a majority.
I should also add that after my comment, I asked Congressman Courtney a question. It was about how to better address Blue Dog/conservative concerns raised about lower Medicare reimbursal rates for rural health providers and a potential expansion of this effect under a public option, perhaps by adding an amendment that specifically addresses this disparity, in order to get more Congressional votes behind the public option. While my remark was a procedural question about how to best achieve what was ultimately quite clearly a progressive end, the fact that I was taking conservative concerns at face value and suggesting solutions for how to legitimately address them made it impossible for a single person to boo me after I was finished speaking. The Congressman's answer strongly suggested that he agreed such an approach was constructive, and was in fact already being discussed, to my pleasant surprise.
I also have to mention that if I at all managed to disarm the RW at that meeting, I was at best the third most effective speaker in the audience: it was a rugged steel worker union guy with the patriotic populist sharpness and effectiveness of a Jesse Ventura or a James Cornette, and especially a pro-life military family Sunday school teacher with a child she couldn't insure because of pre-existing condition whose incredible comments in favor of a public option were a home run, and made it very clear which side of the debate won that meeting. If I had to guess, I would strongly suspect that the wingnuts left that meeting fairly dejected, and that Congressman Courtney was generally quite happy with the way the meeting turned out (all the stress and drama not withstanding).
By the way, if I had to describe one common factor about my statements and those of the two people I just mentioned, it was the fact that our statements were worded in a way that the winguts COULD NOT BOO US - and didn't. That's the real secret when it comes to scoring points in this environment; historically, it's conservatives who hijack patriotic language that "you just can't boo" to score big points, but they got way less of them in than the pro-public option side.
There was also a gentleman who stood up and said at least the Democrats are trying something, and the Republicans aren't - he was a registered Republican himself (letting us know by ending his remarks with a disgusted "by the way, I'm a member of the party of no!"). He argued during his comment that it's better to try and fail than not try at all, and when the usual suspects objected, he silenced them with "If my arm is bleeding, I'm going to put a bandage around it if I don't have stitches; I'm not going to sit there and bleed to death." There was also a point where a far RW questioner, barraging Courtney about the AMA, was followed by a doctor who introduced himself as a member of the AMA and explained why he supports the public option, causing the far RW guy to look dejected but then immediately forced to applaud the doctor's support of tort reform (the not applauding of which apparantly results in forty lashes from Freedom Watch).
I would estimate that while the audience was 70-30 in favor of a public option, the people who stood up and commented or asked a question were closer to 60-40 in favor of the public option; conservatives absolutely got their say - in other words - which is very important, but just as importantly, they were not able to effectively disrupt the meeting's question and answer session either. There were plenty of supportive statements from the crowd about single payer and extended applause afterwards from the majority of the crowd; it's funny - on a progressive site like dkos, I might be debating one of those folks about whether pushing single payer now was the right way to go, but in that room on the front lines of the battle for health care, the single payer advocates clapped for every show of support for the public option, and vice versa. We knew instinctively in that room that this was NOT just an internal progressive dialogue about optimal strategy, and that we HAD to be on the same side against the dead-enders. It was unspoken.
Reasonable Conservative, by the way, was waiting patiently the entire duration of the meeting with her hand up until the very end - not being rude to anyone or being among the yellers. She began her remarks and let me tell you, she was really good; she described herself as an independent voter, and was making the kind of cost-cutting arguments and efficiency arguments that many would agree with (despite them being insufficient on their own, they're hard to argue with), and still sounded reasonable enough in her points on tort reform.
Then... all of a sudden, at the very end, her voice raised to make her last point, and she went into an UGLY rant about illegal immigration that completely ruined all her credibility in the room among everyone but the wingnuts (offending even a Chilean-American gentleman who had been on her anti-reform side of the argument due to his personal negative associations and instinctive recoiling at anything presented as communist - his mouth gaped open at her comments).
As my fiancee was leaving the building, she overheard the lady formerly known as Reasonable Conservative tell someone else that she works for an insurance company in Rocky Hill.
So much for Reasonable Conservatives, sadly.
My biggest regret is that I didn't talk for longer when I had the floor (like others after me did) and that I didn't read off the top ten list in full. Had I done so, it would have pre-emptively shut down EVERY single piece of misinformation the anti-public option citizens in the meeting said during their comments and questions, in the same way my use of #2 on the list shut down the chaos operation.
Furthermore, if I had my comments to do over, I would have added a little more on the "good conscience" point in the middle of my statement, and said that: "I've been an independent voter most of my life, I've lived in this district for most of my life, and I've never been to a town hall before, but I'm here because I am appalled that the private insurance companies are spending 1.4 million dollars a day to kill the public option, paying off and bussing in phony citizen groups; while many people on both sides of this issue are here from the district, for and against, people who would bark and yell and prevent others from talking have been bussed in by insurance companies to town halls around the country, so we can tell right away who they are. The insurance companies know the only way to kill the public is to get people of good conscience fighting, while they laugh all the way to the bank. They don't think very highly of our intelligence. But I think that this year - this time - they're wrong." That prevents any comeback from conservatives who ARE from the district from chipping away at the point being made; my failure to do this made my comment an A- when it should have been an A+, so please be careful not to make the same mistake I did.
I made certain to print out a copy of the top ten list for Congressman Courtney and gave it to his aide at the end of the meeting.
This video by the conservative Norwich Bulletin - although it's way off the mark in its implication of who 99% of the out-of-district folks were - shows both the union guy I mentioned speaking in favor of the public option, as well as the Chilean guy speaking against (this is before that illegal immigration rant from The Artist Formerly Known As Reasonable Conservative visibly offended him), along with Rep. Courtney's answer to him. It is only about five minutes long. It's really important to set the stage here, as this was more than the halfway through a very intense meeting, and everyone was incredibly fired up:
NOTE: While I posted an earlier incarnation of this diary yesterday, my recap of the town hall was somewhat rushed given my hurry to post it, and left out a lot of stuff, so I thought a more thorough and better organized post was in order.
UPDATE: One commenter brought to my attention that a shorter version of the list would be useful to send as letters to the editor to newspapers around the country, which I think is a great idea. For situations such as that, where something with only a few hundred words will do, here is a shorter version of the list and the argument that it presents, stripped down to its bare bones:
- If you've always paid your premiums on time, you're as likely to be dropped by a private insurance company when you need life-saving care as you are to get treated; they can also overrule your doctor's advice for life-saving treatment and only offer to cover something cheaper.
- Private insurance companies are spending $1.4M a day to kill the public option, inventing phony citizen groups, and trying to scare the elderly about euthanasia and pro-lifers with abortion; they know the only way to kill reform is to get people of good conscience fighting each other, while they laugh all the way to the bank. They don't think very highly of our intelligence.
- The average American family pays $16K/yr on health care while the avg. Canadian family pays less than $2K/yr, and businesses can no longer afford to provide insurance under the current system. Every independent estimate says the public option will SAVE the government money, from anywhere between $150B (CBO) to $265B (Commonwealth).
- So - if you'd rather spend more taxpayer money, bankrupt businesses, AND pay $16K a year for your family's private insurance coverage in exchange for a policy that can be dumped the second you actually need it, then the current system is great for you. If you'd rather spend less, have less of a chance of dying, and want to remove the corporate bureaucrat from between you and your doctor, then a public option is the way to go.