Tulsa World: Health care, other issues discussed at Coburn's town hall forum in Jenks

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Health care, other issues discussed at Coburn's town hall forum in Jenks

Senator Tom Coburn speaks to a full house at a town meeting at Jenks High School about the health care reform debate on Friday. JAMES GIBBARD/Tulsa World

By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer
Published: 8/14/2009 8:45 AM
Last Modified: 8/14/2009 10:21 PM

Related story: Coburn draws a crowd in Muskogee

Much of the public outcry over health-care reform, U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn said Friday morning, is about something other than health care.

His town hall meeting in Jenks on Friday evening seemed to prove it.

Although health care remained the dominant topic, discussion ranged much further afield than at the earlier town hall in Broken Arrow or Thursday town halls in Muskogee, Webbers Falls and Sallisaw. It touched on the stimulus, the banking system, energy policy, campaign finance reform, the United Nations, lawyers and socialism.

“Most of the angst over health care is not really about health care,” Coburn said at the outset of Friday night’s meeting, more or less repeating what he said earlier in Broken Arrow. “It’s about spending our kids’ future.”

As he is wont to do, Coburn boiled down almost all questions to constitutional issues and pronounced them outside the purview of the national government — including, at one point, health care.

Nevertheless, he readily concedes the need for a national health-care policy and said Friday evening that “the assumption that if you’re not for what President Obama is for you’re against health-care reform is wrong.”

Coburn, a Republican, has introduced a bill that would expand health care by subsidizing private insurance through refundable tax credits and forcing insurers into shared risk pools for policy-holders with pre-existing conditions.

The Democrats’ plan creates a government-sponsored “public option” for those who cannot otherwise get insurance. Critics say it would be both ineffective and put private insurers out of business.

Large crowds followed Coburn throughout his two-day sweep of northeastern Oklahoma. In Jenks, a standing-room only crowd filled the 750-seat school auditorium and gave the senator a standing ovation upon his entrance.

Coburn did not always tell the majority what it wanted to hear. He defended Obama at times, calling the Democratic president “a friend of mine” and deflecting a statement from the audience concerning Obama’s birth certificate.

“You are upset because you believe there was a violation of the Constitution,” he said. “I don’t think there was.”

He said Obama secretly agrees with him on much of health-care reform. Coburn also said, though, that Obama is committed to a single-payer Medicare-type system, something Coburn unalterably opposes.

Coburn also defended the children of illegal immigrants and his own vote on the initial Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“We were four days away from every bank in the country closing,” he said. “Had we not done that, we would be seeing 1929, ’30 and ’31 again in this country.”

Coburn did not feel the same about Oklahoma’s use of $600 million in budget stabilization funds through the stimulus program.

“I want to tell you what a bad deal that is for Oklahoma,” he said. “That means your Legislature and your governor didn’t make the hard choices.”

Earlier, an estimated 1,200 people showed up at Broken Arrow’s 350-seat Playhouse Theater, forcing a move to a gymnasium three blocks away. That set off a miniature land run as people hurried — and in some cases sprinted — to the new location.

It also caused Coburn’s staff to move the Jenks meeting from City Hall to the school auditorium.

At both locations, some in the audience expressed frustration that they had no control over who is elected to Congress from other states.

At Jenks, a man said, “Most people in here know that Oklahoma ain’t the problem. (Jim) Inhofe ain’t the problem. (John) Sullivan ain’t the problem. There’s 49 other states out there. How do we get the stroke to (convince) all these people of our God and our guns and our freedom?”

He was cheered, loud and long. By RANDY KREHBIEL World Staff Writer

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Reader comments for this story have been moved to the most updated version of the story, now under the headline "Video: Standing-room only," which was published on 8/15/2009. So far, 235 comments have been made.