My friend Mr. Bingley went to Rush Holt’s town hall meeting, and has a report, aptly titled, Because we won.

Mr. Bingley was able to get there very early in the afternoon, which is a good thing since people were turned away from the door and the first 238 people on line were allowed into the meeting.

Among the incredible news, Rush Holt insists that “Medicare is successful and Medicare is solvent:”

He feels that people are not well served by their insurance companies now and he believes that we will be better served by the government forcing companies to “compete in an insurance store” (This seemed to be his answer to all of our problems; he said it so often that it got to be a running joke in the group of folks I happened to be sitting with) where consumers can choose amongst different options, with one of those options being a government run plan that would be a paragon of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The idea never occurred to him that the government “forcing” companies to compete is like them “forcing” us to be friends, and that a system where the Government is one of the “competitors” is no competitive system at all: how can you possibly compete against the referee? Invariably the government will be the only player left.

The crowd was grumbling on and off through out all of this (and I would say the crowd seemed to me split probably 60/40 against the plan) but a lot of us had a good laugh when he said that “Medicare is successful and Medicare is solvent.”

His basic theme is that this bill will be funded by all these savings that will be realized by effectively putting everyone on Medicare.

Much like all those jobs that have been “created or saved” by the stimulus package (when one discounts the rising unemployment, of course).

Go read every word.