My Town Hall Question

Mr. President: When it comes to health care reform, the only bill we have available to look at is the 1000 page bill in the House (H.R. 3200). When you tell the American people that detractors of health care reform are either misinformed or outright lying about the proposed legislation, by default you must be referring to this particular bill. Now, people smarter than me have read the entire bill, and they have in a very reasoned manner listed by section and page(s) aspects of the bill that they believe are troubling. Indeed, they have used the actual wording in the actual bill to make many of their points, points that you now describe as being false and/or misleading. For someone like me I have to ask myself, do I trust these people who have read the bill? Do I trust their assessment of the language, the intentions, the loopholes, and the ultimate consequences of this bill, or do I trust you?

The fact is that all of this is very confusing. You tell us that these people have it all wrong, and that the bill does not say what these people say it says; but I have yet to hear you point to any of the sections or any of the pages of the bill to make your point. In other words, you are asking us to simply trust you when you say that you don't want the federal government to take over health care, that we get to keep our own private health insurance, our own doctors, that all of this will cost us less and give us more, even though the bill seems to be saying the exact opposite. My question: would you provide the sections and the pages of the bill that support what you are telling us? As a follow up, if only one aspect of this bill were to survive, would you tell us the section and page(s) of the bill that you believe is the most important?

UPDATE: This following video is indicative of what I am referring to above. This video is on the White House Reality Check website. Everything that this doctor says, and everything that Obama says, is said without any reference to the actual bill. They make these promises and they tell us what they think we want to hear, but that doesn't matter if the bill says otherwise. Show me in the actual bill that congress might be voting on where it supports what you are promising.