More than 200 people filled the council chambers at Peachtree City Hall Aug. 26 for an educational town hall on healthcare. And a no-frills, fact-laden education is what they got. The only emotion displayed was the applause for the speakers. The town hall meeting was sponsored by the Southern Crescent Tea Party Patriots.

The evening’s first speaker was Coweta resident Peter Jannsen, who for the first 41 years of his life was a citizen of The Netherlands. Peter came to the U.S. in 2001 and became a citizen in 2007. He told a real-life story of the government-run healthcare system in his native land.

Some aspects of the Dutch system were commendable, Jannsen said, such as the provision of primary care, no prohibition on pre-existing conditions and the low cost of the available prescription drugs supplied by U.S. pharmaceutical companies.

“Overall, the system under which I grew up was good if and only if you didn’t develop a chronic illness or if you didn’t get old,” Jannsen said. “There was very little choice of family doctors, too few specialists, expensive diagnostic tools were quite scarce and there were very long waits, of course, for those diagnostic procedures. Expensive drugs were not prescribed even though they would have been more effective.”

Citing issues for those people with a chronic condition, Jannsen said that as a person in America with Type 1 diabetes, he sees an endocrinologist and was prescribed an insulin pump. Yet in The Netherlands for four decades he only saw an internist, he was never referred to an endocrinologist and was never considered a candidate for an insulin pump.

Noting the way in which terminology can be used to adapt a population to a specific point of view, Jannsen said the Dutch deny that healthcare rationing exists, yet they will acknowledge that the “allocation of scarce resources” does occur, especially with the elderly.

That was the case with his mother, who had to wait four years to get a knee replacement. In the meantime, she was told to take an aspirin if the pain became too intense.

Ron Bachman was one of those on the panel who had spoken the previous week at the Southern Crescent event in Newnan that was attended by 300 people. Bachman is a member of the American Academy of Actuaries, a fellow of the American Society of Actuaries and a Senior Fellow with the Center for Health Transformation (CHT). Bachman said in previous years he had worked with Newt Gingrich, one of the people that initiated CHT, and other Congressional leaders such as Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.

“Healthcare has nothing to do with health, it’s about power,” Bachman said at the outset. “If you recognize that you’ll understand some of the issues we’re talking about. The current system is broken. I think we all know that.”

Stressing the need for genuine healthcare reform, and one that is not controlled by the government, Bachman also recounted an array of statistics, some of which were intended to show how those who are uninsured are more likely to suffer and die from lack of healthcare.

“Healthcare has got to be changed. Do we create a government-centered system or do we create an individual-centered system?” Bachman asked. “We did a study that showed there is a product and an approach to healthcare that would lower costs 12-20 percent in the first year and would lower costs (over time) 3 to 5 percent. But this has been dismissed totally by the politicians in Washington. It is a Health Savings Account. It gets dismissed because it changes the power in the wrong direction from where the politicians want to go.”

By way of example, Bachman said it is illegal in 24 states for small employers to help contribute to their employees’ purchase of an individual policy.

“At the end of the day, the problem is that we don’t have a free market,” Bachman said. “The place to watch (on the current healthcare bill) is on the Senate side. (These) two committees don’t have to pay for anything. They just put together the bill and meet all the constituents’ needs they want. The only adults in the room are the Senate Finance Committee because they have to pay for this stuff. So watch what happens more in the Senate and write your Congressman. I think Senators tend to have a more national view and I think they listen nationally.”

Fundamentally as it stands, Bachman said that the U.S. does not have a free market in healthcare. He cautioned that, unless prevented, healthcare reform being touted today could become “the biggest potential slush fund ever created.”

During his remarks, national healthcare expert and candidate for Georgia Insurance Commissioner Gerry Purcell at the outset of his comments told the audience he had been diagnosed with cancer at age 29 and was in surgery three days later. Purcell said that, for him, healthcare is a personal and professional issue.

“It wasn’t in three weeks or three months or 16 months. Three days,” Purcell said. “I know that we can reform this system without destroying it.”

Purcell said that since 1973 the nation has received 1,900 state and federal mandates to healthcare. Some were good while others added 20-50 percent of the cost of healthcare. And in terms of where we stand today, Purcell said we are about to destroy 90 percent of a good system to fix the 10 percent that is a problem.

The challenge, he said, is to provide coverage for the most people while providing the best care and the lowest cost. Some states, such as Massachusetts, have focused on the coverage while neglecting the care and the cost. Insurance plans need greater disclosure. And every dollar spent on healthcare should be deductible, he said.

Refuting conventional wisdom, Purcell said that “when anybody tells you there is a free market in healthcare they are flat wrong.

“I can tell you we don’t have a free market. The government is already managing 50 percent of the clients,” Purcell said. “What we need to do is to have a free market. We need to allow the free market to work. If you can buy a healthcare policy in Iowa that costs you $98, that same policy costs you $200 in Georgia because we’re in the top third in highest healthcare costs. If you could buy your healthcare from (a company in Iowa), talk about competition.”

Citing other examples of the need to refurbish the healthcare system, Purcell said we need 24-hour clinics next to emergency rooms to reduce costs, tort reform, fraud reduction and reduced costs for pharmaceuticals.

“We need some leaders with backbone that will tell Canada and Europe that we’re not paying their share of the cost anymore,” said Purcell. “We’re subsidizing 30-40 percent of their healthcare system and we pay for 60 percent of the world’s pharmaceuticals.”

The fourth to speak was Macon family practice physician, Dr. Michael Green, a member of the 7,000-strong Medical Association of Georgia.

“We believe the mechanisms that finance medical care in this country have failed and that they need reform to improve the system. However, we don’t feel that the government taking over the system and running it is what we need to do. We think what’s needed is to revise the private healthcare system and to put some changes in place to basically put the patient back in charge of their healthcare. Not the government and not the third party payer. Just you and your family and your physician,” Green said.

Green said individuals should be able to purchase and keep their health insurance policy across jobs and state lines. That eliminates the issue of pre-existing conditions.

“The insurance companies do not look upon the patient as their customer. They couldn’t care less, by and large. They have to make sure that their customer, which is the employer, is happy with what they are doing,” Green said.

Green said his association is opposed to the current healthcare bills and opposed to the public option. Citing Medicare, Green said it was introduced in 1964 as an option for seniors who could not afford to purchase medical insurance.

“But today, how many options do you have if you are over 65?” Green asked. “Part of the Medicare bill still says that at no time shall the federal government interfere with the physician-patient relationship. But that is a lie.”

“Many people on Medicare find it difficult finding a physician who will accept new Medicare patients,” he continued. “Why is that, because we don’t like old folks? It’s because the reimbursement is lower than the cost of providing the care. So every practice has to limit the number of Medicare patients.”

The programs in Maine and Massachusetts now having waiting lists for people to get on those programs, he said. If it does not fly there it will not fly here, he added. And in Canada there is a lottery just to be assigned a physician, Green added.

In total, the proposed healthcare system will lead to rationing and a bureaucratic morass, Green concluded.

“We urge President Obama and Congress to reform our healthcare system in a way that emphasizes individual choice and individual freedom,” Green said.

In his remarks state Rep. Matt Ramsey of Peachtree City, the only elected official on the panel, had suggestions on how voters could impact the thinking of politicians. Among other things, Ramsey said that aside from the customary notion of writing a letter to the official from “your” area, write each member of the Georgia delegation.

Addressing healthcare specifically, Ramsey said that as it stands today, this healthcare bill will have ramifications that amount to the complete and total takeover by the federal government of the healthcare system.

“That’s the goal,” Ramsey said. “And once it’s in place it will never, ever go away.”

Though Jannsen and some of the others also spoke at a similar Southern Crescent healthcare town hall meeting in Coweta a week earlier, he is not a public speaker. Jannsen was one of a couple of dozen people who gathered at Sharpsburg Baptist Church on the morning of April 4 to make signs for the Tea Party rally that would be held at Newnan City Hall April on 15.

People at the time were already making fun of the “crackpots” across America who intended to protest some of the actions of their government. But it was in the activity room of the church that morning that Jannsen was talking about healthcare. Americans don’t understand, he said. They don’t understand what is coming and what it will mean.

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