Health care stirs emotions

Now that wasn't so bad.

Congressman Henry Brown held his long-awaited town hall meeting Thursday night, and no one got out of hand, no one shot at anyone, and nobody bit off anyone's finger. The Lowcountry appointed itself well.

Of course, it might have helped that everyone had to check their pitchforks and AR-15s at the door.

It all started at 7 p.m., which coincidentally was kickoff for the Gamecocks' season opener against N.C. State. But that was just a coincidence. Really.

Brown warmed up the crowd with a medley of his greatest hits -- promoting offshore drilling and griping about Cap and Trade before making it clear we didn't need to overhaul health care.

There are "only" 46 million people in the country who don't have health care already, he said, and 10 million of them probably deserve it. He's a workhorse, not a calculator.

But, as it turns out, folks had a lot more on their minds, and much of the 90 minutes was spent on TARP (bad), socialism (worse) and term limits (good).

Well, when your team is on the bench, anyway.

Boooooooooooooooo!!!

There were a few rough moments when people yelled "Resign!" or "You're not answering the question!"

But in the congressman's defense, exactly how do you answer "When are we going to get some guys in Washington who'll call this administration what it is -- socialist?"

Uh, haven't you ever heard of Jim DeMint?

Actually, Brown did pretty well, meaning he didn't pander as much as he could have. While he did perpetuate the whole "death panel" malarkey, he stood his ground when they wanted him to say he supported term limits. He doesn't, and said so ... after a little heckling.

And when someone asked him to promise never to vote for another bill with earmarks, he pointed out that not all of them were bad; that earmarks got Charleston Harbor dredged, kept the Intracoastal Waterway open. Which is true.

But he still got booed.

Misinformation overload

One thing's for certain: The whole idea from a few years ago that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president during a war is out the window.

When one person suggested the previous administration left the country in pretty bad shape, she was nearly booed out of the place.

And when Brown talked about unemployment, how we need a change, the implication was that all this started in January. Come on, there's more than enough blame to go around.

But that's not what the crowd wanted to hear. When someone suggested administrative costs for Medicare -- government health care -- are allegedly a fraction of private insurance's same costs, people jeered.

There weren't a lot of technical questions, and no one brought up the real problem: the insanely escalating cost of private insurance. But they wanted to know about how good Brown's health coverage was. He said it was no better than other federal employees', that "there's a lot of misinformation out there."

There sure is.