Town Hall decorum and a bit of history

http://american.com/archive/2009/august/town-hells

I remember the anger 20 years ago. I was running Roll Call, the congressional newspaper, at the time. President Reagan signed the Catastrophic Coverage bill into law in July 1988, and Congress repealed it in November 1989. Six years later, Richard Himelfarb published an entire book on the subject, Catastrophic Politics. He described in detail how seniors "angrily confronted lawmakers on their trips home."

Nor is the concept of organizations getting people out to town hall meetings something new. Democrats used trade unions this way to help defeat President Bush's effort to reform Social Security and stave off the system's insolvency.  [...]

The truth is that the uproar over the lack of decorum at some of today's town hall meetings is a sideshow. President Obama and many Democrats in Congress are trying to push changes in healthcare that Americans, quite simply, do not want. People are skeptical of plans that will vastly increase government spending at a time of record budget deficits—and they fear losing what they prize most: the ability to choose their own doctors and not suffer the kind of rationing that plagues European and Canadian systems. In addition, judging from history, they think that further government intervention will raise costs.