Are health care forum protests “un-American”?

So how is your summer going? Has it been too hot, too dry, too short, or otherwise failed to meet your expectations? If so, you can take heart in this one fact: at least you aren’t a sitting congressman who has to go back to his home district and hold a public forum on health care reform. I haven’t been to one myself, but from here it sure doesn’t look like they are having much fun.

You’ve probably heard that there have been some rather spirited protests at these forums. Democrats have accused right-wing special interest groups of organizing these raucous demonstrations and say they are preventing Americans from having a much-needed debate on the topic at hand. Republicans swear that these protests are a grass roots phenomenon and contend that they just show how upset ordinary Americans are with Obama’s attempt at a government takeover of the health care industry.

So are these protesters interfering with the Democratic process? Should the demonstrators politely wait their turn to speak at these forums and allow everyone to have their say rather than disrupting the proceedings with their screaming and shouting? And is it bad form to hang your local congressperson in effigy?

In the past, my answer to all three of these questions would have been yes. But there has been so much nonsense going on for so long in Washington DC that I’m afraid my answers now might be “yes”, “no”, and “you’re lucky you’re only being hung in effigy, pal.”

Ordinarily I’m a non-partisan, even keel sort of a person who sees a certain amount of merit in both sides of a good argument and I like for everyone to have their say. But it seems like things have been going so wrong for so long in our country that now I’m not so sure that polite debate is getting us anywhere good.

Unsurprisingly, Nancy Pelosi and I disagree on this. In a recent op-ed piece she authored with fellow Democrat Steny Hoyer, she said that “drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.” I’m not sure what universe she’s been living, but in my experience drowning out opposing views is pretty much the way politicians have been advancing their agendas for as long as I can remember.

More humorous (or more perhaps more disturbing) was this statement from the Pelosi/Hoyer piece. Once their health care reform passes, they contend that “never again will medical bills drive Americans into bankruptcy; never again will Americans be in danger of losing coverage if they lose their jobs or if they become sick; never again will insurance companies be allowed to deny patients coverage because of pre-existing conditions.”

Do you hear that? “Never again” will any of the bad things that now happen to sick people in our imperfect health care system happen again, ever! Barak Obama and Nancy Pelosi are going to solve these problems for everyone, for all time!

I don’t think so, Nancy. What you are almost certain to do is raise my taxes and make the system much less effective for the majority of us who already have employer-provided health insurance that works pretty well, most of the time. Just because something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean that changing it will make it better. And looking at Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA hospital situation, I don’t see any reason for us to have confidence that the federal government is going to “fix” the health care system. Not in a good way, anyhow.

Maybe these health care forum protests are interfering with the democratic process, but maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. That process, as it exists right now, doesn’t see