This excerpt is from The Fount online news article entitled: "Fleming Wants 'Right Kind' Of Healthcare Reform Pt. 1

The Minden Convention Center in Minden, LA hosted Congressman John Fleming's Town Hall Meeting this past Monday August 24th 2009, as the announcer introduced Minden's very own being a member of two house committees: Armed Services and Natural Resources. Serving on the Natural Resources committee positions the congressman to assist with enacting the Haynesville Shale Project in north Louisiana which will provide a viable and significant source of natural gas and thousands of jobs.

Congressman Fleming once served as a doctor in the U.S. Navy, was awarded as "Louisiana's Family Doctor" in 2007 and with his medical practice and the non-medical businesses that he owns, he is reported to employ some 500 Louisianans.

After being introduced, the congressman opened up by letting it be known how happy and comfortable he was to be addressing his hometown people. He began his presentation by saying, "I went to Washington thinking it was a very hypocritical and arrogant place. I found when I got there, I had greatly underestimated the problem.

This country since January, and a little bit before January, but since then has taken a very, very sharp left turn if you haven't noticed. And I saw it coming very early and became very concerned and began to seek God about it."

He went on to say "One of the very first bills we passed; the executor bill was a bill to expand Medicaid to people who were middle if not higher incomes, and stripped away our ability to require the recipients be citizens of the United States - shocking to me. So already in healthcare, we have a situation where your tax dollars are taking care of undocumented workers.

Of course we did the second bailout, that is the first bailout was during Bush's administration and the second one was during Obama's administration. Again, lots of money being plowed into companies to prop them up, companies that in many cases are not well-run. And interesting, the President was choosing the winners and losers, and as it turned out - a lot of the winners were really close to the president. And that's in terms of the personnel shifting back and forth from Goldman Sachs and companies like that.

And we all know about the fiasco that happened with AIG; executives were getting millions of dollars of bonuses undeservedly at the taxpayer's expense. The money was going directly from you to the government and into the pockets of the executives. But where it really hit home I think for everybody was when the stimulus bill was passed - a 787 billion dollar bill that was supposedly to flatten out the recession we were going into. But I can tell you that it was not any more than 20 years of pent up social programs that were cast upon the citizenry at your cost.

It's being spent on just ludicrous things. They had a list of 'em up on TV today, uh it was something like the sexual habits of rodents $200,000; just really wasteful spending; a billion dollars on a railroad between L.A. and Las Vegas. And of course that's Harry Reed's area in Nevada." The congressman went on to say that the stimulus package was "the biggest chunk of pork you could ever find, and it's done nothing for our economy."

Congressman Fleming then compared President Obama's strategy for fixing America's economy to the other 7 countries which attend the G-8 summit. He said that when President Obama talked to persuade these "socialistic countries" into passing a similar stimulus bill "they thought he was crazy, that it was a wasteful, dumb thing to do, we tried that before and it didn't work." The congressman then said these other countries have come out of their recession much faster than we are, and "in fact, we're not even coming out of it yet."

He then stated his sore displeasure about only being given 4 hours to review and discuss the 1,100+ page pork-filled bill before voting on it - which of course is not humanly possible to disseminate. "And that was done by design. It wasn't so much so that we couldn't read it, but because they didn't want YOU to know what was in it. Understand that, okay?" said Congressman Fleming.

The congressman then discussed the Cap & Trade Bill by describing it as a $500 billion tax on energy bill that does nothing for the environment and is hurtful to all states in our country. He said the bill has already passed the House, but not the Senate yet, and if it did pass it will cause higher unemployment.

He said not even Greenpeace believes it will do anything for the environment, and that the country of Spain passed a similar bill 10 years ago and their unemployment rate is now 18% and they have lost a lot of manufacturing companies that ended up coming to the U.S. He said if this Cap & Trade Bill passes, that manufacturing companies will flee to India or china where there are no restrictions on CO2 emissions.

Congressman Fleming then pointed out that once again, this particular bill was not presented until a few hours before being forced to vote on it to keep the citizens from knowing what was in the bill. For the most part, the entire audience present was completely silent and very attentive to the congressman's initial presentation. He let it be known that the reason these recent Town Hall sessions have been very successful thus far is because Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed's efforts to pass the bill before the August recess failed and people have had a chance to really examine the bills (the House version and the Senate version) and they are upset about what's in those bills.

Congressman Fleming expressed the urgency he felt to not only discuss the specifics of the healthcare reform bill, but to explain his version of the politics behind it all. He said that people approach him all the time asking why he and his peers just don't reach a happy compromise on this issue.

He said that the politics of the situation would "prevent that from ever happening" and then reminded everybody that there are 250 or so Democrats compared to 170 Republicans in the House. He then said there are about 50 "blue dog Democrats" who were elected in conservative districts like his own with the idea they would remain conservative when they got to Washington. "But nothing further can be from the truth" said Fleming.

He went on to say: "The first thing they did was vote for the Speaker of the House, and who did they vote for? They voted for Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. She and some of those close to her are extremely liberal to the point of being socialists. And they don't have to worry about being socialists because they come from extremely liberal districts that enable them to be re-elected for 30 years."

The congressman said Pelosi controls even the blue dog Democrats with money and the ability to campaign against them if they don't vote with her the way she says. The congressman said "So what you really have is a small core number of very powerful elected socialists in the House of Representatives and they have tight-fisted control over the rest of the Democrats. And why? Because they want to keep their job. So they do what 'Queen Nancy' tells them to do. And there are some Republicans that do that, but only a handful. But you've got probably a hundred Democrats who are that way.

So hopefully, that gets you to understand why there's no such thing as compromise. They've got the numbers. They can push these bills through without one single Republican voting for them. And they don't include us on anything. We don't know what's going on until the bill is out there to be voted on. When it's in committee, we try to put amendments in just to mitigate a little bit some of these awful bills, and they throw them away immediately.

And the blue dog Democrats claim to be for a balanced budget, and yet they voted for trillions of dollars in debt. And they claim to be pro-life, and yet they block amendments that we try to put in. We've got the MOST liberal President that we've ever had. We've got the most liberal House of Representatives that we've ever had. And I wouldn't say that the Senate is terribly liberal like the House is, it's much more middle of the road but it has 60 Democrats. So it is filibuster proof if they ever want to push through a bill that's been passed from the House."

The congressman then changed gears by specifically addressing healthcare reform: "Understand that we have 48 million people in America who are uninsured. And I ran for Congress on the platform that I believe in healthcare reform. There's things we DO need to do to improve healthcare delivery in this country. But I'm not in favor of House Bill 3200 which is the Democratic form of government takeover of healthcare. So, I'm for reform but I'm against government takeover of healthcare in any form or fashion." said Fleming.

The first signs of audience reaction came when Congressman Fleming began to breakdown who he believes the 48 million uninsured people actually consist of. "Forty eight million, well who are these people? First of all, the first 10-13 million are illegal aliens. The only way to deal with the illegal alien problem is with immigration reform. If they stay here, they need to be legal, they need to pay in. If they are illegal and they don't need to be here for some reason, they need to go back. So that's not really a healthcare problem, that's an immigration problem.

Another 10-17 million are what we call 'The Invincibles' the age 25 or so year old young healthy adults who have jobs, who can afford good healthcare but who choose not to. You know 25 year olds are indestructible and probably will never need it. And in most cases they don't. But you see, if they do it's not there and that means you have to pick up the cost because they end up not paying."

The congressman also discussed how monies from this group of young people are not available to offset the healthcare costs of the older group, and how that particular problem had not been addressed but could be with the proper incentives.

The congressman continued to break down the number of 48 million uninsured by saying "We have another 5-10 million people who qualify for Medicaid or Medicare that just don't sign up, and we're not really doing anything to find those people.

Congressman Fleming said that one way to assist the remaining 10 million or so Americans who want and need insurance would be to pass laws that would prevent insurance companies from excluding coverage for people who have pre-existing conditions.

He then discussed a certain federal law in existence that mandates emergency room treatment by saying "So don't let anybody tell you in America, that just because you don't have insurance you don't have access to healthcare, that just isn't true."

He talked about how people could not be refused treatment due to their inability to pay, how they would definitely receive a bill, and if a future medical event occurred, even if they had not paid for the previous emergency room visit, they still could not be denied emergency room treatment. "But that's not the idea" said Fleming. He further commented on how costs could be dramatically cut by preventing sicknesses before they became urgent enough for emergency room treatment.

Due to the length of the congressman's initial speech and the long line of people who had questions afterward, the meeting carried into overtime, as many issues were discussed. This concludes the first segment of Congressman John Fleming's Town Hall Meeting at the Minden convention Center.

Part 2 of 3 can be found here. Part 3 of 3 can be found here.