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Joe Courtney's town hall in Woodstock

by: Scarce

Fri Aug 07, 2009 at 11:56:10 AM EDT

This is basically a heads up on a diary I saw at Daily Kos this morning by someone who actually attended last night. [Edit:] The video above is from Free Norwich. a local rightwing site I take it. The Norwich Bulletin, ("Emotions run high at health care talk in Woodstock") also had a piece on the event.

Here is a bit of what ShadowSD wrote at DailyKos:

GO TO THESE TOWN HALL MEETINGS AND CALL THEM OUT, using the same type of language, including the "insurance companies don't think very highly of our intelligence"; they are not prepared to be called out, and it throws them off their game. There was no doubt leaving that meeting that the public option side in the room had won the debate, and that the wingers actually only represented 25-30% of the room - but the perception could have easily gone the other way had the meeting continued the way it started, with the minority sounding so loud it seemed to be a majority.
I also have to mention that if I at all managed to disarm the RW at that meeting, I was at best the third most effective speaker in the audience: it was a tough guy steel worker union man with the populist sharpness and effectiveness of a Jesse Ventura or a James Cornette, and especially a pro-life military family Sunday school teacher with a child she couldn't insure because of pre-existing condition whose incredible comments in favor of a public option were a home run, and made it very clear which side of the debate won that meeting. If I had to guess, I would strongly suspect that the wingnuts left that meeting fairly dejected, and that Congressman Courtney was generally quite happy with the way the meeting turned out (all the stress and drama not withstanding).

As well as a link to a downloadable flyer made by ShadowSD with some excellent points called Why A Public Option Makes Sense, aka "The Ten Health Care Talking Points EVERY DEM MUST REPEAT".

Scarce :: Joe Courtney's town hall in Woodstock

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Joe Courtney's town hall in Woodstock | 2 comments

Recommended reading about insurance rescission (4.00 / 1)

Thanks for the link to the "Why A Public Option Makes Sense" site. At the end of that list, there is an excellent link to a piece about health insurance rescission rates - http://tauntermedia.com/2009/0...

The thrust of that piece is to point out that while health insurance CEOs may accurately state that rescission rates are only 0.5%, the actuall impact is very damaging:

Half of the insured population uses virtually no health care at all. The 80th percentile uses only $3,000 (2002 dollars, adjust a bit up for today). You have to hit the 95th percentile to get anywhere interesting, and even there you have only $11,487 in costs. It's the 99th percentile, the people with over $35,000 of medical costs, who represent fully 22% of the entire nation's medical costs. These people have chronic, expensive conditions. They are, to use a technical term, sick.
An individual adult insurance plan is roughly $7,000 (varies dramatically by age and somewhat by sex and location).
It should be fairly clear that the people who do not file insurance claims do not face rescission. The insurance companies will happily deposit their checks. Indeed, even for someone in the 95th percentile, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the insurance company to take the nuclear option of blowing up the policy. $11,487 in claims is less than two years' premium; less than one if the individual has family coverage in the $12,000 price range. But that top one percent, the folks responsible for more than $35,000 of costs - sometimes far, far more - well there, ladies and gentlemen, is where the money comes in. Once an insurance company knows that Sally has breast cancer, it has already seen the goat; it knows it wants nothing to do with Sally.
If the top 5% is the absolute largest population for whom rescission would make sense, the probability of having your policy cancelled given that you have filed a claim is fully 10% (0.5% rescission/5.0% of the population). If you take the LA Times estimate that $300mm was saved by abrogating 20,000 policies in California ($15,000/policy), you are somewhere in the 15% zone, depending on the convexity of the top section of population. If, as I suspect, rescission is targeted toward the truly bankrupting cases - the top 1%, the folks with over $35,000 of annual claims who could never be profitable for the carrier - then the probability of having your policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two. You have three times better odds playing Russian Roulette.

by: Mr. Clean @ Fri Aug 07, 2009 at 18:29:30 PM UTC