Meeting with our Congressman

Last week two friends and I met with our congressman, Jim Cooper, to discuss some questions about the healthcare bills before Congress. He's a nice man, and we were glad to have met him. It was a pleasant experience, but as we walked out of his office, I found myself commenting, "Is it just me or was that thoroughly disappointing?"

You see, I think on one hand we so didn't want to be lumped in with all of the vitriolic voices arguing over this issue that we went too soft. Additionally, we were only notified a day ahead of time that the congressman had an open spot in his schedule, so we didn't have much time to do enough research to be fully prepared.

Most disappointing for me was that I had hoped that by speaking in person we could have a discussion, a conversation, that would shed light on it all in ways that most of the media reports do not. I wasn't there to get soundbites. I can get that from the news. But I also got that in my congressman's office. I got generalities and pleasantries but very little real information. And, maybe he's already listened to a lot of people as he's formed his stance on this issue (maybe he's listened out?), but I didn't really get the impression that he was trying to listen to us in a deep, really listening kind of way.

All that said, the fault isn't only his. It's partly ours. We allowed the conversation to veer off track and struggled to bring it back to the reason we'd taken the time to come to his office in the first place. We weren't prepared with as many specific, direct questions as we should have been. Ben, one of the friends at the meeting, wrote this blog post summarizing some of what we learned about having an effective meeting with an elected official.

Additionally, we learned that Congressman Cooper isn't in favor of the healthcare bill we've heard the most about in the media. Instead, he favors The Healthy Americans Act, HR 1321. He says this bill solves the problem the Democrats say must be solved (providing all Americans with health insurance) the way Republicans say it must be done (via a free market solution). It also does this without all the debt that accompanies HR 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act. However, he says the media hasn't covered this or other alternative bills much. The media person in me finds myself asking why his communications person just now added a section on this bill to the congressman's website, as we were told in our meeting that that portion had just gone live. This issue has been so huge that I'm wondering why they waited until the end of recess to put that up on his website. But that's really neither here nor there.

What is here and there is that it's important to keep trying to engage these issues in ways that are about cooperation instead of anger. At least we succeeded on that point.