Photo by Gus Wezerek
“I’m not with the Party of ‘No,’” said homemaker Kathy Smith, “I’m with the Party of ‘Hell No.” Outside the Patriot Center at George Mason University, Smith stood tawny under a Virginia sun and her yellow protest sign that said “Oba-Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward.’”
“Are you against Obama’s health care plan?” one woman asked Smith.
“I’m against the government takeover of health care,” Smith said.
“You are wrong,” the woman said, “It’s about life. It’s about beauty.”
“I’m not here to argue,” said Smith, and the woman turned on her high heels, clicking down the sidewalk into the stream of students leaving President Obama’s Friday rally to pass the health care reform bills the House will bring to a vote on Sunday.
Smith had stayed outside for the event. “You couldn’t pay me to see him speak,” she said.
The president delivered what basically amounted to a stump speech for the legislation, casting it as a moral and economic imperative. “Not only can we afford to do this, we can’t afford not to do this,” Obama said.
The $940 billion measure will provide coverage to 32 million people now uninsured, as well as barring insurance companies from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions. It will also establish a marketplace for small-business and self-employed individuals to pool together and buy coverage.
For the most part, the crowd was riveted to an unjacketed Obama, pointing and swaying at the lectern. “And by the way, all the young people here today, starting this year, if you don’t have insurance you will be able to stay on your parent’s plan,” the president said, bringing the crowd to its feet.
A few hecklers proved distracting early on in the event. One young woman in orange yelled something along the lines of “Murderer, you’re a murderer,” until an official put her in a full nelson and dragged her from the enthusiastic crowd of about 8,500 people.
Photo by Gus Wezerek
Not everyone opposed to the health care bill was so easily identifiable.
“My classes were canceled because of this and I mean, how often are you going to be able to see the president?” said Sam Harvey, a 19-year-old film and video studies major at GMU.
But Harvey said she was less than pleased about the direction of health care reform. “I believe in respect and dignity for all humans alike and this murdering of babies needs to be stopped,” she said, alluding to the issue of federal funding for abortions – stripped completely from an earlier version of the House bill and limited in the newer, Senate-amended bill House Democrats hope to pass.
“If I could just say,” interrupted Kristen Eisenhart, who was sitting next to Harvey, “I work with 12-year-olds who have been raped and [are] victims of incest by their fathers and uncles. To not offer them a choice if they’re pregnant is wrong.” Eisenhart, a psychologist from Fairfax County, continued, “Sexually abused youngsters – they don’t have health care until their parents relinquish their child so they can get coverage through foster care.”
Eisenhart, a psychologist from Fairfax County, said she supported Obama and volunteered for his campaign in 2008. She would have liked to see a public option in the final version of the bill, but thinks progress now needs to be incremental.
“My husband owns a small business and he saw his health care premiums jump 23 percent last year and 14 percent in this year. He’s considering whether or not he can still afford to offer coverage,” said Eisenhart, explaining her personal desire for reform.
Doors opened at 9 a.m. for the 11:30 a.m. speech, the line constricting down around the Patriot Center. Groups of Tea Partiers, campus progressives, Obama fans and the odd fraternity peddled their ideological wares to those waiting to get in.
Photo by Gus Wezerek
Social worker Mary Lee Cerillo had a pro-reform sign in hand as she inched toward the door. Cerillo was a national delegate for Obama in Denver and said she had attended many health care rallies and town hall events in the past months.
“I’m in the helping profession and I’m watching my patients get rejected for preexisting conditions,” she said. “I’m to the point where I don’t even charge patients their co-pay so they can come.”
Cerillo, who lives in Centreville, Va., said she considered anti-reform Republicans hypocritical when they call the bill fiscally irresponsible. “[President George W.] Bush has been abysmal and I think people have forgotten that quickly,” said Cerillo, who harped on the former president for “spending into the deficit like a drunken sailor.”
“I wasn’t really happy when Bush ran up the deficit,” said Smith, as the few others around her chanted, “Kill the bill.” But the health care package is in a league of its own, she said: “I feel like starting Sunday, my children are indentured servants.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scored the combined Senate bill and reconciliation amendment today, estimating it would cut the deficit by $143 billion over the next decade. Democrats plan to pass the amended Senate bill through a budgetary procedure called reconciliation that only requires a 50 percent, 216-vote majority.
“If these people are dying of health care, why aren’t the benefits kicking in until 2014?” asked Smith, who said she had once been a “bleeding-heart liberal” until she began flipping channels and noticed Fox News was covering stories she said other networks ignored.
Indeed, 98 percent of the bill’s $940 billion dollar cost is spent in the final six years of the decade, leading some to worry Democrats will keep the spending but delay or repeal payment from increased Medicare cuts to doctors and excise taxes on expensive “Cadillac” insurance plans in the later years.
Photo by Gus Wezerek
One woman approached Smith and asked to take a picture together. Smith blocked her face with the sign, standing alongside others with signs that said, “Kill the Bill” and “Bend Over 4 Dr. Chicago.”
The spectacular nature of the event extended indoors. “I’m here to see him speak, to see the President. It’s like going to a basketball game,” said Arinze Ozobia, 24, a political science major at GMU.
Ozobia wasn’t the only one with basketball on the brain. “A lot of the reporting in Washington, it’s like SportsCenter. It’s considered a sport,” said Obama. “It’s Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.”
Obama said he didn’t know how the vote would affect him politically, but it didn’t matter – the legislation he called a “patients’ Bill of Rights on steroids” was for the American people, he said.
“It’s history in the making right here on campus,” said Joyce Hahn, a nurse and assistant dean in the master’s division at the GMU School of Nursing.
Hahn said a lack of bipartisan support for the Senate bill wouldn’t detract from it, but “it would make me sad the Congress we elected can’t come together…These congressman against health care reform should come and walk a mile in our shoes.”
Another GMU faculty member, Provost of International Relations Susan Graziano, said she was excited to see the president again and was impressed by the package House Democrats have compiled.
“You never know what’s going to happen. I mean, I have good health care coverage now, but I could get sick, I could have an accident,” she said. “This is not going to be perfect, but it needs to be started…before we get a Republican into the White House again.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer confirmed tonight the House will vote tomorrow on the Senate bill and reconciliation amendment separately. If passed, the Senate bill will go directly to the president to be signed while the Senate will vote later on the amendments.
Hoyer said he has a letter, signed by more than 50 Senate Democrats, saying they will vote for those amendments. This controversial chapter of the American saga may reach an end if House Democrats muster a majority tomorrow. Leading legislators appear confident in those prospects.
Photo by Gus Wezerek
