It appears the president isn’t a great listener.
The entrepreneur who hosted President Bush last week for a roundtable discussion on health care and small business said yesterday that he could barely get a word in as Bush opined on children’s health insurance and other health topics.
If he had, Clifton Broumand would have told the president he disagreed with him on most of it, he said.
“He answered his own questions,” said Broumand, who gave Bush a tour of Man & Machine Inc., the Landover-based medical computer accessory company he founded 25 years ago. “I thought the whole concept was to ask us, so I was a little bit frustrated. I would have liked the opportunity to give him my viewpoint, rather than him knowing the answer.”
Mr. Broumand apparently was under the impression that the president, when he said he was anxious to hear a variety of viewpoints, was actually anxious to hear a variety of viewpoints.
The White House’s response struck me as amusing.
Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said the fact that Broumand disagrees with the president shows that the administration does not stack Bush’s public events with partisans.
See? Bush was in the same room with someone who didn’t agree with him on something. Sure, the president wouldn’t listen to what the man had to say, but shouldn’t Bush be congratulated for his bold tolerance for dissent and competing ideas?
For what it’s worth, the president probably needed to hear what Broumand wanted to tell him.
For Broumand, a Democrat who did not vote for Bush, expanding the insurance program for children is a no-brainer. More than 8 million children lack health insurance, according to the Census Bureau. Without coverage, Broumand said, they are less likely to get preventive care and more likely to need expensive emergency room visits, with the costs absorbed by consumers.
“My personal feeling is that the plan should be to cover every child, whether it’s private or federal,” he said. “When you don’t cover children, what ends up happening is that when kids are sick, which happens in my office, parents aren’t productive. They have to go home.”
Broumand said he is not in favor of a government-run health system. But he is no fan of insurance companies either. The plan he offers to his 28 employees costs $300 a month for individuals and $800 for family coverage. The business pays $5,600 a month for health insurance — more than it spends on rent — and premiums have increased 73 percent since 2003, he said.
Private insurers “are like the Godfather — they make you an offer you can’t refuse,” Broumand said. “When my insurance goes up 73 percent in four years, that’s a tax. . . . All these things are hidden taxes.”
Since 45 million Americans lack insurance, there already is “de facto” rationing, he argued.
It’s a shame Bush prefers to “answer his own questions”; I would have liked to hear him respond to Broumand’s.