Fake Question Time III: Healthcare

Tonight was the Mayor’s third “Town Hall” meeting hosted at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in the Mission, which was just announced last week and sneakily slipped onto the Mayor’s web site with an earlier date. Of course, these campaign stops have also been called “Fake Question Time” and “The Gavin Show” or just “Infomercials.” In this case, he was there to talk up his health care plan — which even Gavin had to admit largely was the work of Tom Ammiano, who not only came up with a plan to cover all San Franciscans, but a way to pay for it by mandating that employers reimburse The City for covered employees.

Gavin, beholden to local business interests, was against the mandate until it looked like all the fawning national press he was getting for his part in the proposal would cease if the plan was shot down. Now the Golden Gate Restaurant Association is suing The City over the plan. Wouldn’t want coverage for over 80,000 uninsured San Franciscans to get in the way of profits derived by keeping service employee wages low, now would we?

Many of the usual suspects were there, including Julian Davis, Marc Powell, Krissy Keefer, Marc Solomon and the legendary chickens on the progressive side; Beth Spotswood looking put together as usual, a brief appearance by SFist Elaine and Luke Thomas on the snarky side; and a bevy of officials in uniform and department staffers on Gavin’s side, a few of whom even had departments with some relevance to the topic at hand. Sorely missed were Eve Batey, stuck at work, and Rita Hao, on vacation — not to mention Gavin’s significant other (betrothed?) Jennifer Siebel.

Out in force were the media, as well as ACORN, but it was PODER who seemed to cause most of the drama. They were primarily concerned with affordable housing, as part of the Mission anti-displacement efforts, though Gavin treated any outbreaks of public outcry as a new parent is taught to ignore the cries of infants. After the first coordinated vocal outburst, Gavin dressed down the crowd [MP3] and made the oft-heard call for ‘dialog.’ As long as that dialog was mediated by the question cards provided (to his credit, he read mine [MP3], though it was on a topic already addressed and therefore unnecessary).

In two interesting side notes, I spoke to Julian Davis about the shut down of the new Balazo Gallery location shortly before the GavinWatch party was due to be held. According to Davis, the gallery had been treading on thin ice with the neighbors after a few too many loud parties. The party has since been rescheduled for this Thursday.

But don’t fret, another conspiracy theory was suggested by Marc Solomon — at one point, Gavin addressed the people in the audience who didn’t have health insurance [MP3]. A woman directly in front of me responded in spanish, to which public health director Dr. Mitch Katz had what seemed to be a prepared response in her native tongue. One criticism of the last fake question time was that there were no interpreters on hand. Couldn’t miss them this time.

These events have been going further and further off the rails each time. I can’t wait for the next one on the topic of crime and violence — it’s supposedly planned for April but it could apparently happen at any time, day or night. For more madness, I posted a view camphone videos on Blip and photos on Flickr.

You can check out my liveblog of the first Fake Question Time, as well as a video interview afterwards. The second Fake Question Time I only had time to leave a comment on Rita’s post at SFist.