DUNCAN MANSFIELD
BRISTOL, Va. — More than 200 protesters from a conservative corner of Appalachia showed up Wednesday in opposition to President Barack Obama's health care reform effort.
Some held signs reading, "Obamacare is political malpractice" and "Keep your hands off my health care."
The president was holding a town hall meeting later Wednesday, just days after more than 2,700 poor people from Appalachia were treated at a free clinic for decaying teeth, fading eyesight and other maladies.
U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, a Democrat who has represented southwest Virginia's 9th District since 1982, said the clinic by Tennessee-based Remote Area Medical "put an exclamation point in a very visible way on the fact that we have 47 million uninsured Americans."
The 10th annual clinic in nearby Wise, Va., drew a turn-away crowd of desperate men, women and children from Virginia, eastern Kentucky and northern Tennessee.
"The need is running about the same, but I suppose it is getting worse from the standpoint that it is getting even more expensive for these people," said Stan Brock, the British-born jungle guide for Marlin Perkins on the 1960s TV series "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" who founded Remote Area Medical in 1985 to serve the poor in the United States and abroad.
"This is not a peculiarity of southwest Virginia," added Brock, whose next "expedition" will be an eight-day clinic in downtown Los Angeles beginning Aug. 11. "It is like this everywhere. The faces are just different. Health care in the United States is the privilege of the wealthy, the well-to-do and the very well insured."
The protesters, who came from the tri-state area of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, were focused on who will get to make health care decisions.
Art teacher Angie Meade, 39, of Bristol said she worries that government control of health care will mean she can no longer pick her own doctor.
Elaine Powers, 69, also of Bristol, said she thought people over 65 would receive only what she called "end of life care."
Powers said she believed the elderly would be given only pain pills.
The audience inside the town hall meeting was to include about 100 union-represented and insured cashiers, baggers, managers and clerks at a Kroger grocery store. Cincinnati-based Kroger, the nation's largest traditional grocery chain, operates in 31 states and spends more than $1 billion a year on health care and related benefits.
Kroger spokeswoman Meghan Glynn said the company thinks reform is needed. "It is a complex issue that must balance the needs of citizens, the costs to individuals and businesses, and issues of access and quality of care," Glynn said.
Bristol is a city uniquely divided with the Tennessee-Virginia state line running through the center of this combined community of about 41,000.
U.S. Rep. Phil Roe, a Republican and retired obstetrician who represents the Tennessee side of Bristol, said the vast majority of his constituents "are scared to death" about Obama's health care initiative.
"They are worried about the government intrusion into their health care system," he said.
"We have experienced firsthand in Tennessee what a public option meant, which was TennCare," Roe said of Tennessee's expanded Medicaid program. The program once covered the uninsured who made too much money to qualify for Medicaid. However, soaring costs forced the state to scale it back substantially in 2003, and thousands of people lost coverage.
"It decreases access, and when you decrease access you decrease quality and increase costs," Roe said.
Boucher supports health care reform and thinks most Americans do, too — as long as it doesn't compromise treatment options and their quality of care.
"But the public is not going to offer broad support until there is a broad understanding of what is being considered," he said. "We should not rush something through."
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
