Health Careless - Are You Shouting Or Listening?

The national mood on a new healthcare system is in chronic need of a timely injection of new enthusiasm and confidence among the electorate.

Requiring funding of one trillion dollars of unknown origin, during uncertain economic times, has depressed the motivation for redesigning the country's entrenched healthcare infrastructure, a definite reversal trend in supportive public opinion which had swept an inspired nation during the presidential election.

To be sure, the President is out to accomplish just the kind of turnabout in public opinion on the sagging healthcare issue with a renewed enthusiatic infusion of confidence, much in the manner which got him elected. But the good folks in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who came to hear President Obama on the matter at hand, were muted in their cross-section response, but at least in a decidedly attentive and civil manner.

Not so lucky with Republican turned Democrat, Senator Arlen Specter, who had to physically intervene between two jostling constituents in a Pennsylvania town hall meeting. The crowd was decidedly boisterous and, well, pushy.

And there was the extreme from the fringes for Georgia Representative David Scott whose district office sign was painted over with a swastika, an act which the congressman says is showing a hateful and racist element emerging on the issue of healthcare.

So where does everyone proceed from here during the nation's August recess?

Do Americans support healthcare less now?

M. R. Lawrence
Midday