Having given up all hope recently of seeing true health care reform in my lifetime, I have contented myself with sitting back and watching the “town hall” crazies go at it.
They are much more fun to watch than the still-believing, true-reform-remains- possible crowd — you know, the ones who still bother to show up at the congressional dog-and-pony shouting matches happening around town to ask pertinent, cogent questions.
They are people like 20-year-old Megan Young, who showed at Rep. Mike Coffman’s session Monday night simply to ask why having affordable health insurance available to everyone is so controversial. Bless her heart.
What young Megan does not understand is that such a question will never get her on TV — unless, of course, she asks it while packing a semiautomatic 9mm on her waist, or with an AR-15 assault rifle slung over one shoulder.
“Quite frankly,” said the woman, who works in food service management and has no health insurance, “I’d like to be able to go to the doctor if I break my leg or if I get sick.”
You see! If all of a sudden people like Young and their concerns begin dominating the national discussion, where would we be?
My cynical self is convinced the health care industry will never let meaningful reform happen.
Then, too, I never thought I’d live to see a black man sitting in the Oval Office. But trust me, this one is different.
The reason is, too many scared or uninformed folks are playing right into the industry’s hand.
“RIP Grandma. Cause of Death: Treatment Denied,” read one sign at Coffman’s gathering. Forty-seven million Americans uninsured, and it comes down to such ignorance?
They make me both weep and laugh.
I call Coffman, a man I like. He’d planned for one town hall. He ended up doing four.
And no, he was not letting any signs inside his Castle Rock meeting, he told me. And he would alternate between those for and against health reform.
“There was a level of emotion and passion between the two sides I hadn’t seen since the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, such gut- level emotions that ran so high,” he says. “It was a lot of pressure.”
Coffman, a first-term Republican congressman from Littleton, acknowledges he did not expect such a legislative pace when he was sworn in after the first of the year.
“The stimulus package, cap and trade and, now, health care, it has been quite a ride,” he says.
The palpable anger over health care, he says, does not surprise him.
“I get it: The American people feel insecure right now. Rightly or wrongly, they feel this whole thing drifting toward socialism, which I think is a function of uncertainty over the economy, and the dramatic, very dramatic change that is afoot. It is the 1960s all over again, the speed of change. This is what you get.”
Forty-seven million Americans haven’t insurance, I remind him, getting back to the task at hand.
He responds by saying he is definitely not in favor of a government-run “public option” insurance program, that there are ways to make affordability work within the current system.
I think of too-scared-to-get- sick Megan Young, and how the current system has been so affordable for and so benevolent toward her.
I just laugh.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
