“A Good Meeting”: Congressman Shuler Holds Productive Meeting With Tea Partiers

Aug 7, 2009 5 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

Paid who? Angry what?

Asheville Tea Party:

At 5:15 pm this evening, 8 representatives of the Asheville Tea Party and 1 Hendersonville Tea Partier were given a private audience with Congressman Heath Shuler.

In our group were Dr. Bill Rieke and his wife Margaret, Bill O’Connor, Doug Lack, Gary Shoemaker, Brian Umbarger, Jeffery Lane, Bill Lack, and me, Erika Franzi.

I began the discussion by sharing with Congressman Shuler some of the concerns that many of you have shared with me.

* This plan is too expensive for a country that is already broke.
* The federal government is not capable of handling the responsibility of an industry that makes up 15% of our economy.
* The Public Option as a backdoor route to a Single Payer health care plan.
* Achieving universal healthcare without shooting costs through the roof means rationing of care.
* This plan, if its so good, should be required for all federal employees.

I then turned the floor over to Dr. Rieke, a semi-retired physician who moved here from North Dakota. He has extensive experience treating patients who traveled to the United States from Canada in order to receive proper and timely healthcare. He shared his impression of the Canadian health care system with Congressman Shuler, rightly comparing it to the system that is being proposed in HR 3200. Dr. Rieke also stressed the importance of Tort Reform to any effort at Health Care Reform, and the fact that this essential element is being completely ignored by the current legislation.

Bill O’Connor is the director of the Hendersonville Tea Party movement. Bill talked to Congressman Shuler about the inevitability of rationed care in the proposed system. He pointed out that there is no way to contain costs when adding millions of people to the system unless you ration care. He also discussed the reality of the language in the current bill that refers to “End Of Life” issues, which mandates that persons over age 65 report on their plans for end of life measures every five years. Bill also warned Congressman Shuler against voting for a government program that will introduce political corruption into the medical field whereby folks who contribute to campaigns might get better care.

Doug Lack, a health insurance professional, discussed the actual problems with health insurance as it exists today with Congressman Shuler. According to Doug, the only way to make the current situation any worse would be to allow the government to “compete” with private insurers with the Public Option. Doug says group health policies are a mistake and are done for the convenience of the insurance companies.

Gary Shoemaker, the founder of Liberty Asheville, spoke to Congressman Shuler about the unconstitutionality of passing a government healthcare bill. Gary compared the proposed Department of Healthcare to the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, two initiatives that have cost the taxpayers billions of dollars and have, by any measure, failed to meet their goals. He reminded Congressman Shuler that these programs not only represent a huge part of our economy, they strip personal responsibility from citizens and place it in the hands of Washington bureaucrats, with poor results. Gary said, “The things that all of these programs have in common is; that they are not constitutional, they are bureaucratic, they are ruining our economy, they stifle innovation, they are placing our future in jeopardy.”

Congressman Shuler then asked for suggestions. Suggestions given were: improvements to the exchange system, tort reform, and looking to the free market for the solution to the current health care mess.

Congressman Shuler, of course, does not agree with everything we had to say, but there was much in our discussion that we did agree upon. In my opinion, he seem to agree that this plan is too expensive. He seemed to agree that the burden on small business owners was unacceptable. He seemed to agree that the exchange system needed much improvement.

Before we closed the meeting, Congressman Shuler told us he will vote no on HR3200.

He was very gracious and he spent well over an hour chatting with us when he had originally planned to only give us about a half and hour.

We ended our time by telling him we would relay the news that he is not “in hiding” if he will tell his colleagues in Washington that we are not a pitchfork wielding “angry mob.”