Healthcare Reform a Tough Sell in Town Halls Where Recession's Hit Hardest

The start of the August recess saw Democrats heading home to try to sell healthcare reform to their constituents. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, my local suburban Maryland congressman and one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lieutenants, told the New York Times: "We understand the future of health reform could hinge on how the conversation with the American people goes in the next six weeks."

Pelosi began that conversation by promising a "drumbeat across America" to respond to what she called a "shock-and-awe carpet-bombing by the health insurance industry to perpetuate the status quo." This despite the fact that up until that point the industry had reportedly run only one ad, which wasn't negative, and had done little grass-roots organizing. So it wasn't the industry that began the bombing; it was Pelosi, when she tied the "immoral" bad-guy health insurers to Republicans and labeled them all "villains."

The battle was on. Town hall meetings in Texas, Missouri, Maryland, and elsewhere were "crashed" by citizens upset with the Democrats' healthcare reform bills. Americans for Prosperity, a state-level organization heavily involved with the Tea Party movement, plans to bus protesters to August town hall meetings in Montana, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, and Indiana, to name a few states with important Democratic members of Congress. Montana, for example, is the home state of Sen. Max Baucus, powerful chair of the Finance Committee overseeing the Senate healthcare bill.

One grass-roots organizer in Wisconsin with Americans for Prosperity told me he hasn't seen anything like this since the Vietnam War protests; over a thousand people attended a town hall in Fond du Lac in early August. "Something's going on out here!" he said.

What's going on is that constituents who don't usually go to town hall meetings are suddenly deciding that they want to talk with their Member of Congress about the Democrats' proposed healthcare reform—after all, nothing is more important to most people than their health. Most adults alive today have seen an increase in healthcare costs over the last few decades, but they've also seen advances like MRIs, PET and CAT scans, cholesterol, cancer, diabetes, and heart medications for their loved ones; and a concurrent jump in our expected life spans. Unlike, say, monetary policy, healthcare is something about which most Americans have a very strong opinion.

Speaker Pelosi, in a USA Today op-ed with House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer, called these "disruptions" in public meetings an "ugly campaign," and implied that the health insurance industry was behind them.

"Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American," they wrote. Through a spokesman, President Obama tried to undo the damage, saying that "vigorous debate" is actually "part of the American tradition." As the cable news shows have continued to stoke the summer fires by running footage of town halls and interviewing angry participants, it's been Sen. Claire McCaskill who has been the voice of reason. She told MSNBC she's looking for the "moderate middle" on healthcare reform, and her town hall of 2,500 voters—"just frustrated" people who don't trust government—was a "great democracy moment" in Missouri, not manufactured or un-American at all, but "absolutely authentic."

There's more to the story. It's worth noting that many of these healthcare battleground states also have very high unemployment: Missouri (9.3 percent), Indiana (10.7 percent), North Carolina (11 percent), and Ohio (11.1 percent), for example. It's no wonder the Gallup numbers show that 7 out of 10 Americans think the economy is our top problem, not healthcare (in fact, most Americans do not believe that the U.S. healthcare system is in a state of crisis, according to Gallup). People in those states are nervous about approving major healthcare reform. They are not yet convinced that the last massive government spending program, the stimulus package, has had any impact. It's no surprise folks are concerned. Many of them are upset because of the economy and government spending, not because they are lunatics or haters or "un-American."