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No rumble, but a little pot-stirring, at town hall meeting

August 11, 2009 — As an overflow crowd gathered at Georgia Perimeter College Monday night for US Rep. Hank Johnson’s health care town hall meeting, the familiar ta-ta-pok-BOOM of a high school band getting ready for football season could be heard across the road. This was a good cadence for what was to follow, though not in the way you might think.

A lot of people probably came to the town hall, which filled the college’s auditorium with the overflow watching it on closed-circuit TV in the gym, expecting a rumble. It was nothing of the sort.

Instead it reminded me a great deal of the year Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery was integrated when I was a student there some 44 years ago. Back then, there was a lot of extra security, and a lot of speeches from the principal and faculty about how the students were expected to act in a matter that would be a credit to the school. It was much the same Monday night – extra police, and a lot of reminders to be civil and respectful. There was even a designated protest area outside for those who couldn’t behave themselves.

“Down here in the South, we know how to get along with each other,” Johnson said in his introductory remarks – words I can almost hear my old principal saying.

It worked back then, and for the most part it worked Monday night. No one was shouted down, and no one “rattled” any of the speakers.

“I have a three-year-old and this is first day of school, so I’m already as rattled as I could possibly be,” said DeKalb County District Health Director Sandra Ford, one of seven panelists who spoke at the forum.

The panel was a big reason this town hall didn’t devolve into a shouting match. They gave the audience something worth listening to, more so than themselves. They not only were articulate and thought-provoking, but -- to the credit of Johnson and the staff which assembled the panel -- represented a real diversity of opinion, including one panelist, Dr. Todd Williamson, president of the Georgia Medical Association, who was outspoken in his opposition to the House version of the health care reform bill and the concept of a public option provision.

“We are afraid the creation of a public option will lead to a single-payer system as the only option,” Williamson said. “When Medicare was created it was an option for senior citizens but now it is the only option.”

Those in the crowd who opposed the House bill cheered Williamson, but they also applauded Ford when she said personal responsibility had to be a component of any true health care reform plan. And there was applause from the other side for Dr. Arthur Kellermann, professor of emergency medicine and associate dean for health policy at the Emory School of Medicine, when he spoke of the travesty of hospitals turning away uninsured patients in desperate need of emergency care.

“Take it from me, an ER doctor: When your life is on the line, you want your doctor to go the extra mile, not your ambulance,” Kellermann, said.

Michael Young president and CEO of the Grady Health System, drew both cheers and boos when he differed with Williamson over the public option component, which he termed “critically important,” but he also provoked reflection from both camps when he worried aloud about the aging of the nation’s doctors and predicted “a physicians’ shortage like you will not believe” when the current economic slowdown eases enough for those who have postponed their retirement to hang it up.

Then it was the audience’s turn, and had it not been for the principal himself stirring the pot, this evening might have gone down without any serious outburst at all.

More than once during the evening Johnson criticized the Blue Dog Democrats for their more conservative approach to the bill. In a wordy response to a question close to the end of the session, Johnson said the Blue Dogs had “watered down and eviscerated” the House bill, and expressed contempt for the Senate version of the bill, which he said would “not even be worth passing, as far as I’m concerned.”

Then he lit into the Republicans, which predictably drew jeers from those in the audience, and shortly afterwards made the mistake of answering a challenging question shouted out of turn. The resulting exchange got the questioner thrown out of the hall by the police, to the cheers of his supporters, and undermined the civility the congressman had to that point been quite successful in maintaining, without changing a single mind. Johnson might have called this being honest with his constituents about his views, but it hardly seems sporting to get into a debate with a dissenting constituent when there's a policeman standing over him.

In some ways this puzzling twist at the end mirrored the entire debate over health care reform. Johnson obviously was approaching it as a debate between Democrats over whether there will be a watered down bill or true reform, and he seemed more interested in staking out his position on the left of that divide than keeping outright opponents of the bill quiet. But carelessly tended, the whole enterprise could still come tumbling down.