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Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Forum Inquiries Skewed Left
By Phil Parker
Journal Staff Writer
Questions skewed left at Monday night's health care town hall forum, which wound up so packed it was split into two separate Q-and-A sessions, each featuring Rep. Ben Ray Luján and two pro-reform experts.
Questions for Luján and two other health care professionals on the panel were submitted by attendees on index cards and read aloud by Sherry Kraemer, who served as moderator. Kraemer is a member of the social justice committee at the Unitarian Universalist Church where the event was held.
“Far-and-away, the questions were supportive of health care reform,” Kraemer said. “There were a lot of things negative about the insurance companies. A lot were repetitive; how many ways can you say 'Are you going to support a single-payer or public option?'”
Questions were written out on cards ahead of time on Monday, as many people arrived at the church early and a fire marshal ordered no further admittance about a half-hour before the first town hall began. Because of the huge crowd, a second group was allowed in for what was in effect a second town hall after the first concluded.
On the issue of overcrowding, event organizer Bob Stearns, also of the church's social justice committee, said the church had invited Luján to the panel discussion that evolved into the town hall, and the congressman confirmed his attendance only late last week. So the church didn't have enough time before Monday to secure a larger venue, Stearns said. Seating capacity at the church was set at 180 people.
Kraemer had ample time to separate the questions from the audience into categories and decide which queries would be addressed by the panel.
“I tried to be representative of the distribution,” she said. “I wanted to make them informative questions, not just sound-bite questions.”
The note cards were turned over to Luján's staff afterward, and Luján spokesman Mark Nicastre said the congressman plans to have unaddressed questions posted on his Web site (Luján.house.gov) along with answers.
The Journal reviewed the cards and counted a total of 116. Of those, 61 could be considered left-leaning. These included numerous inquiries on the possibility of a single-payer system of health care in America, and several more on the potential for a government-sponsored public option plan to be dropped from legislation.
(Luján said repeatedly at the forum he supported the public option. Nicastre, however, said that the congressman has not decided whether reform legislation would lose his vote if the public option were dropped.)
Other questions repeated in the left-leaning pile included how the government could finance war in the Middle East but not universal health care coverage (the wars were not addressed at the forums) and whether health care should be a for-profit industry (Luján stated repeatedly he thought the public option would work well to control rising costs).
Seventeen of the 116 questions could be considered right-leaning, including one of the first to be posed by Kraemer on Monday night: “Why do you think bureaucrats will make better decisions than me about health care?”
Luján's answer: “They can't. That's why insurance companies need to get out of that decision making.”
Other questions which fell into the more conservative stack of note cards addressed why tort reform wasn't a major part of the bill and why the government isn't focusing solely on providing for the uninsured. Those questions were read out at the meetings and handled by the panel. The subject of abortion, which appeared on two note cards, was not addressed.
Seventeen questions from the town hall wouldn't classify as either liberal or conservative (such as “Why no action on mental health?”), six questions were off-topic and five weren't legible.
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