news story / By North Coast Journal Staff

Mike Check

The Congressman talks health care, Afghanistan, broadband and trails

(Sept. 10, 2009)  Rep. Mike Thompson stopped by the Journal office last week, the day after his well attended town hall meeting on health care reform at Redwood Acres. He spoke with the Journal staff about matters national, international and local. Here’s an extract.

NCJ:We’ve been looking at all the YouTube clips of all these town hall meetings that seem to have gone very badly, in one way or another. This one didn’t seem so bad. How would you rate last night’s meeting? Did you get anything out of it?

Representative Mike Thompson addresses a local crowd at Redwood Acres. Photo by Bob Doran

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Thompson: I though it was a good meeting. The fact is that there are a lot of people who have questions about what we’re going to do in regard to health care, and a lot of those folks brought their questions to the hall. Obviously you had people on both sides of the issue — some who didn’t want anything, and those who wanted some sort of health care reform. The degree to which they were willing to go varied within the room, but I think most people there recognized there’s problems in health care, and they need to be addressed.

NCJ:It’s nice to have a big, substantive debate on an issue of very great national significance, but do these things change people’s minds? 

Thompson: Well, it’s certainly out of the ordinary from the historic town hall trail. I’ve been having them now for going on 20 years, and usually you have to really work to get 30 or 40 people there. That’s why this whole idea of the telephone town hall meeting has been so nice. I’ve done four or five of them since the technology has been available. The last one I did we had 8,500 people on the line, and we had 10,200 the time before that.

But historically, there’s never been a lot of interest. If there’s 50 people there, you can generally name 30 of them before the thing starts. So this is a new interest, and people are out — many of whom have questions, or want to express concerns. Now, the people who show up and start the disruption stuff, and the people who come carrying “No Obamacare” signs or wearing Obama in whiteface stickers — they’re not there for any constructive purpose at all. They want to disrupt. And I don’t think we had any of that last night.

Last night was heartening for me, because everybody … Well, not everybody; there’s some people who think that it’s a government takeover of their lives, but I think that was a minority of people. Even people who had concerns with the bills that are currently in Congress recognized that there’s a need to fix things.

NCJ:A lot of people are disappointed in the level of the debate, at least on the national level. How much do you think the interest in this issue is motivated by actual concerns about health care, and how much of it is partisan politics?

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