Rep. Hill to speak at local town hall

Rep. Baron Hill will speak at a town hall meeting today at Bloomington High School North, where he will address health care reform.

In the last few weeks of the August recess, Hill has been meeting with Bloomington constituents to hear concerns and answer questions about the issue. He met with the IU College Democrats Tuesday and held a town hall meeting in New Albany on Monday.

Today’s town hall meeting is open to the public and begins at 6 p.m. Admission is on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Constituents from various groups and political persuasions will attend the event, eager to hear Hill’s answers to the most troubling and elusive aspects of the health care reform debate.

Hill represents Indiana’s 9th district, which extends north from the Indiana-Kentucky state line to Columbus, Ind., and west to Bloomington.

Charlotte Zietlow, a member of the steering committee of the Bloomington-based Democratic Women’s Caucus, said she is a strong supporter of Medicare for all or some form of a single-payer system.

Being a Medicare recipient herself, she is “amazed at the excellence of administration and delivery of services” she has experienced in the program.

Although Hill has not pledged support to such a program, Zietlow said she believes he is on the right track.

“Nobody can deny that these are not points one can walk away from, although we have been doing so for years,” Zietlow said. “But I do believe that Congressman Hill is seriously engaged in trying to find reasonable answers.”

She said she hoped Hill is considering the high number of uninsured Americans, bankruptcies from high health care costs, the consequences of an unhealthy workforce and the denial of care to people with pre-existing conditions as he tries to find that answer.

But others aren’t so quick to give Hill credit.

Milton Fisk, a member of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan, a group that supports a single-payer health care system, said at the town hall meeting he hopes to get an answer as to how a plan Hill supports would be funded.

“He claims to be a fiscal conservative, and yet he has said he will support a plan which has no definite plan for funding,” Fisk said. “That seems to me contradictory. I would say that the only way a fiscal conservative could support health care reform would be if it provided national insurance, and that would be a single-payer system.”

Fisk said private insurance companies’ administrative costs run about 20 percent, while Medicare’s are closer to 4 percent. A Medicare-for-all approach would keep down the inflation of health care costs, he said.

Some constituents are not coming to argue or ask questions.

Tricia Bock, community program representative for the American Cancer Society, said if she gets the opportunity, she will use the town hall as an opportunity to thank Hill.

Bock said Hill has been a strong supporter of cancer programs, avoiding cutting their
funding even in tough economic times.

Hill has guarded the American Cancer Society’s top priorities regarding health care, Bock said. These include affordability, adequacy of coverage and elimination of lifetime caps.

Lifetime caps impose a limit on the amount of health insurance an individual can receive.

Bock recently learned about an eight-year-old cancer patient in Indiana whose lifetime cap had already been exhausted.

“The fact remains that many people find themselves in that circumstance,” Bock said.
“Even as an adult, it’s devastating to reach your lifetime cap and realize that other than that there’s nothing that you can do except hope you never get sick again.”