Gloria Penner tells the truth about Health Care Townhalls

Listen to Penner's Dead On Commentary

Download Audio MP3 here

Penner explains the mass hysteria about Health Care by ignorant, low income whites:

"PENNER: Well, maybe we're just too vulnerable these days. Often, people become disturbed, disrupted, confused when they've lost economic security and they feel that they're out of touch with the new culture and their place in it. And, certainly, the joblessness of this recession has affected millions and millions of people. Then there's the invasion of, if I dare say that, the social media into our personal lives. That's new. You know, Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and all of that, plus—here it is—the election of our first African-American president. So they've set the stage for some of the disorientation and the powerlessness experienced by large segments of our population, especially the poor, white, working class, militia-oriented people."

Then she picks apart the real problem:

"There are well-heeled interest groups helping to organize the town hall mods. Key organizers include two AstroTurf—that means fake grassroots organizations. FreedomWorks, which is run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients' Rights, and that's run by Rick Scott. You may remember the name Rick Scott. He was the former head of Columbia HCA, that was a for profit hospital chain. He was forced out of that job because there was a fraud investigation, and the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans. They paid 1.7 – excuse me, $1.7 billion dollars, that's billion, in fines. So, you know, we do have these monied interest groups behind it but I think there's something else. The organizers appear aggressive but they – it doesn't appear that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protestors appear to be genuinely angry and the question is, you know, what are they angry about?"

Great Analysis, and dead-on facts.

Finally, she hits the nail on the head about so-called "death panels".

"PENNER: Because I don't think we have time to do all three. Let me talk about the so-called death panels. That actually sort of came through fairly recently when the former vice presidential candidate for the Republican party, Sarah Palin, used that term and Republican Senator Charles Grassley used that term. There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost cutting measure for those people who are maimed or elderly. But over the course of the past few months, anti-abortion conservatives stated that Mr. Obama would pursue a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda combined with accounts of actual legislative proposals—and these were twisted accounts; they didn't really exist—that would provide financing for optional consultations with doctors about hospice care, other end of life services. So they took those accounts, these consultation type panels, and they used that to feed the rumor whereby these became death panels. So I think if people could get beyond that, if they could take a look at this and say, you know, we're – people are trying to scare us and they're succeeding, and I'm going to resist it."

The big guns are trying to manipulate the public opinion through fear tactics (never seen that before), and these right-wing conservatives are too stupid to wise up. The fall for the bait every time.