Tonight we turned out a bunch of people for a Health Care Town Hall sponsored by Damian Dachowski, who used the event to announce that he would be running for Congress against Allyson Schwartz next year.
Normally, HCAN in PA ignore most these events. Given that the press in Southeast PA pretty much doesn’t cover events held by issue activists unless there is controversy, it doesn’t make sense to show up and give the right wingers more publicity. And, given that we are a non-partisan campaign, we especially make a point of avoiding partisan events.
But this was a special case. Allyson Schwartz has been a great champion of health care reform. Her districts is important in that a lot of people who live in it have influence far beyond it. It is a district that is becoming more progressive. And we expected a lot of press anyway given that it was an event that had political implication. So we wanted to get our HCAN activists out to this one.
We did well. More than half the audience was wearing Health Care For America Now stickers. And, the time finally came for questions, a few of us asked pointed questions in support of health care reform.
But it was an utterly painful experience, so painful that I couldn’t resist getting into an argument with these folks.
Dachowski’s speech consisted of his reading from an email containing a series of falsehoods about HR 3200. After ten minutes, I couldn’t take it and stood conspicuously at the side and raised up a sign that said “false” every time he repeated one of the howlers.
The next speaker was a health care consultant, who was even worse, as he gave tendentious reading of the legislation after another.
And finally, they a businessman who seemed like a nice enough man come up. He really didn’t know much about health care except with regard to his own business. He provides an unusual health care package to his employees—a HSA tied to a high deductible health insurance policy in which he gives the employees the whole deductible in cash at the beginning of each year. It may work for his high-tech company but it is clearly not something that will not help most employers or employees in other sectors of the economy.
Most of his speech, however, was spent giving himself a self-satisfied pat on the back for rising out of poverty to start this business. And then he started in talking about personal responsibility and about how 45% of the country pays no taxes and how it’s unfair for him to pay taxes for the health care of others when he rose by himself without benefit of government help.
And I could take no more and I shouted out at him: “You say you got nothing from the government. But you are in a high-tech industry with highly educated employees. There is no business in high technology industries that has not benefitted from government sponsored research in and outside universities. And no high technology industry would have grown up in this country if not for our extensive public investments in higher education which began in 1830.” And then I borrowed a favorite line from the CCNY philosopher, Morris Raphael Cohen and said, “There is no such thing as a self-made man and anyone who thinks he is self made is no credit to his maker.”
I shouldn’t have done it. I’ve been complaining about right wingers who shout out at our events. It was not civil or polite.
But sometimes, there is only so much bullshit I can take.
I don’t plan to go to many right wing events. It’s not good for my blood pressure or for my sense of myself as a rational human being living in a rational world.
PS Having seen her putative opponent, I hope he gets the Republican nomination. Allyson Schwartz will have no trouble with this guy. In fact I joked with Allyson’s fundraiser, who was at the event, and said that he shouldn’t have invited me because now I have no reason to contribute to her this year.