I got to witness Advanced-Stage Townhall-ism on August 11th, when I attended Congressman Adam Schiff's health care panel and forum in the Southern Californian city of Alhambra. Because of high turnout the assembly was relocated to the spacious hillside lawn between the civic center buildings; thankfully, this accommodated the 2500 or so people who showed up. Unfortunately, there were no cordless mikes for the Q & A, so although Schiff's team never faced the criticisms leveled at some other town halls where venue-size was too small to fit everyone who came (thus trampling on their First Amendment rights!), his Q & A required participants to come down to the front of the crowd and yell their question up to the moderator (thus trampling on their First Amendment rights!). Some other devotees of the Anti-Government sect were less paranoid, but had no patience with the staff's failure to find mikes for an outdoor setting that had only been instituted at the last minute.
Supporters and opponents of health reform were all mixed in together, with homemade signs on both perspectives. There were large numbers of posters with slogans from Obama's Organizing for America; their message of "standing together" unappreciated by various stern-faced men defiantly holding a "Pasadena Patriots" banner, a "Don't Tread on Me" flag, and such-like. From the audience response to Congressman Schiff's opening question, the opponents of health reform were matched if not out-numbered by its proponents. (A smaller number were actually undecided.) Dialogue between different sides actually did happen in the crowd, although one side seemed pretty convinced that government as a whole is a consortium of supernatural, un-human demons who stop at nothing to eviscerate democracy and were determined to keep their fingers in their ears against the enemies of democracy (i.e. the Majority, who voted for Obama's promise of health reform at the polls in Nov. 2008, 52.9% to 45.7%.)
One grey-haired couple was convinced that the same federal government which has enabled funding for seniors' health care for the last 44 years was too incompetent or too dangerous to be trusted with funding seniors' health care. The man's sign read: "The Lord will decide how long I live, not the government", and his companion, a woman who sat in a chair and needed a cane, held a sign saying: "The scariest words: I'm here from the government, I'm here to take control of your health."
When I tried to tell them and others that I'd experienced government-financed health care in Canada, where I lived for almost 30 years, and so had my family and relatives, neighbors, teachers, co-workers, and classmates from kindergarten through university, they were not very interested. (The Christian man rolled his eyes at the mere mention of Canada.) I described how my father had a stroke and for the next five years he received all kinds of medical treatment, two and a half years of which were actually in a chronic care hospital where he lived. I was actually told "that's because he was a senior" and "not everyone can get care in Canada." When I tried to make it clear that No, in Canada everyone gets care because it's universal health care, one of my listeners was sure that the waiting times are really long. I tried to get through to him that for 2 years my father received his own wheelchair, X-rays, CAT-scans, MRIs, medication, antibiotics, an oxygen tank, and even a ventilator as soon as he needed it and for free. In fact, his life was saved over and over again. (Moreover, his life was first saved under the much-maligned British National Health Service. He actually had the stroke in London, and went, over a period of about 6 weeks, from being in a coma to being able to walk, talk, and eat again thanks to them.)
I also affirmed that my 83-year-old godmother, who lives in Montreal, has had all kinds of intensive and sophisticated surgeries and other treatments, without long waits. She happens to be someone who reads medical dictionaries for fun and has studied developments in medicine all her life -- taping, quite possibly, every medical show that PBS has ever run and with all that knowledge was very attentive to the quality of care she received. She praised the great skill of many of the procedures she's had. Not all of them -- the doctors in Canada are just as human as those in the U.S. Sometimes there are malpractice suits and bad bedside manners, just like there are here. (I, for example, went to a hospital in the U.S. and they gave me test results that belonged to somebody else.)
However, my eye-witness testimony provoked too much cognitive dissonance to be believed. "I've always heard that people in Canada are unhappy with their health care system!", a man said, shaking his head firmly.
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