Here are my notes from the Town Hall yesterday starring Judy Biggert IL-13 and Mark Kirk who thinks he's going to win the senate seat Obama used to sit in.  

The venue was great, the Arista Hotel in Naperville is a beautiful place and put on a very nice lunch spread paid for by the Chamber and donations. The Naperville Chamber of Commerce was an excellent host and John Schmidt their CEO did a fine job of moderating the session. I hope they'll continue to host open town halls with our representatives in the future.

Judging by the response of the crowd in the ballroom their presentation went over like a lead balloon.

The event was filled to capacity, over 100 people. It's a shame the Chamber didn't allow the television cameras into the room to show the earful Kirk and Biggert got. They would have been able to record just how much folks in Illinois's 13th congressional district want real health care reform, not what Kirk and Biggert were offering.  

I'm gonna ignore the fact that they showed up over half an hour late for an event most people had to duck out of work in the middle of the day to attend. I'm going to skip the the first 40 minutes which I guess somebody decided at the last minute when they saw all those unfamiliar names who registered should be about Transportation, EFCA and Cap and Trade. At 12:45 they finally got around to health care which was the issue this event was advertised to be about.

But first a bit about Mark Kirk's opening remarks. He made the same speech he made to the City Club of Chicago insiders in April about how Illinois is so corrupt. It was an odd speech, sounded more like he was running for governor than senator. He looked perplexed when the audience sat stonyfaced at his applause and laugh lines that worked so well with the swells who bought Governors Ryan and Blago and hope to buy him. Then he told us how much he likes Patrick Fitzgerald. Maybe Fitzy could explain to him about how he's not supposed to be twittering while he's on duty with the reserves which he's already been nailed for, promised he'd stop but continues to do.    

The highlight of Kirk and Biggert's presentation was a powerpoint slide show with cherry picked charts, almost all of which were 4 or 5 years old with at least one going back to 1999. All to show us how wonderful our health care system is compared to the UK and Canadian systems. While the British and Canadians may or may not have legitimate concerns with their systems the systems themselves bear no relationship to the Democratic proposals for health care reform in this country. The Brits and Canadians have continually modified their systems over the years by complaining to their elected representatives. Just try that with your insurance company.

HR 3200 will make health insurance companies really compete against each other and the public plan in a open market, (the exchange). That will change the government protected monopoly racket that gives us no choices these days. It'll make pharmaceutical companies compete against each other too, and if the government directly negotiates prices with the drug makers our buying power with 330 million people will be able to drive a much harder bargain than the Canadians and their 30 million people get.

With real competition our system will look much more like the Dutch or German system. Nobody is proposing the government take over the hospitals as they've done in the UK and a single payer government run health insurance company like Canada and Medicare, isn't in HR 3200. They ought to quit trying to scare people with that nonsense.

In her remarks on health care Biggert told us her well worn story about her daughter's family who have lived in London for 11 years. It was an attempt to give second hand proof that the UK  health care system is awful. Apparently not so awful mind you that Mrs. Biggert's daughter doesn't continue to subject herself and her children to it.

She gave us obsolete statistics about wait times for surgeries in England and once again claimed there's some webpage about it that's down now because so many people have looked at it. I guess she means it crashed. That webpage is down because the information is out of date. Mrs. Biggert knows perfectly well those statistics are obsolete because an English doctor in one of the hearings she claims congress isn't having on health care set her straight. You can see the video of him debunking most of what she told us yesterday below. Yet she continues spreading these falsehoods.

The CBO also says HR 3200 is deficit neutral meaning it won't add to the deficit. It'll squeeze inefficiencies and profiteering out of the system for huge savings and the rest of the cost, $239 billion over ten years as Mrs Biggert accurately pointed out, will be covered by rolling back some of Bush's tax cuts for the richest 1% of wage earners.

If the "Medical Rights and Reform Act" they touted instead is so good why didn't they give us copies of it? Why hasn't it been up on the internet? They released it almost two months ago. Why haven't they submitted it to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring? Kirk says he has one page, three page and twelve page versions of it. Twelve pages to fix health care in this country? That's not a health care plan it's a press release.  

When it came time to answer questions I asked them why they continue to talk about the English and Canadian systems when they bear no resemblance to HR 3200.

A physician in private practice invited them to come down to his office and compare the exasperating private insurance forms that take up so much of his time with the simple Medicare forms that are so much easier to fill out and submit. By law Medicare has to pay him within two weeks of receiving his bill. Private insurance companies play games and delay paying as long as they like.

A wheelchair repairman spoke of the silly rules that protect manufacturers of new hospital equipment from having to compete for business.

A woman complained about government involvement in health care at all saying the free market could do better. There is no free market in health care, most of us have no choice of who we get health insurance from, we have no recourse if the insurance company decides to drop us because we get sick and we're not profitable enough for them. We have no say if the hospital bills $80 for a single Tylenol tablet and the insurance company tells us what doctors we can see. We've let the free market run health care for decades and they've set up a money making machine that forces us to pay twice what the rest of the world pays for the 37th best health care on the planet.  

An Englishman said he has started businesses in the UK, Canada and the US. He made a very important point about how our system is killing American entrepreneurial spirit. While he's well to do and can afford to insure his family there are millions of others who would like to start their own businesses here but don't dare leave jobs with health insurance, don't dare join a start up that doesn't provide it. Mrs. Biggert may mock self employed "yahoos" who make $75,000 a year who don't buy coverage but some people with pre-existing conditions, or family members with them, can't buy health insurance at any price.

The last one, an elderly women shamed them for taking so many campaign contributions from the health care industry to fight against real reform. She called for the public option and said it's inexcusable to fight against reform when our current health care system is way down on the scale somewhere between Costa Rica and Slovenia.

Of the people who were called on I counted 3 who supported Kirk and Biggert's position and 7 who support the President's. The crowd was polite, there were few interruptions, there was no chanting, no outbursts to drown out the speakers as we've all seen teabaggers doing across the country on tv by now. But it was obvious from the reaction that most of the folks in the hall wanted to see HR 3200 enacted into law.  

That's what happened yesterday in Naperville. I hope Mrs. Biggert and Mr. Kirk got the message.