President Obama had yet to deal with sinking approval ratings; had yet to encounter such outrage over Arizona’s lukewarm SB1070 law; and had yet to consider how his actions over the previous 18 months of his presidency may impact midterms. Nope. This time last year, the most powerful 48 year-old in the world had to contend with the initial inklings of voter discontent with the looming vote on reform. Late summer 2009 — in the span of the healthcare debate/debacle — represented the germination of alternative voices to his heretofore mostly respected push for guaranteed access to heatlhcare.

Long before the Tea Partiers became the voice of agita on the right, and before progressives became increasingly disillusioned with the finality of the reform law’s obeisance to Big Insurance, there were the infamous healthcare townhalls. The spirited meetups held far and wide across the country in the midst of legislative action on the proposed bill gained momentum by this time and became a force to be reckoned with. For the first time, Obama was encountering resistance with his signature domestic policy. He had to step up his PR game.

Reassuring the public during economic turbulence last summer, Obama and his party surrogates held townhalls of their own — trying to convince voters and the overall American public that reform was still necessary, amid shrinking state and federal coffers which reflected otherwise.

The news from the U.S. Treasury is stark: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever. You’ll have to go back to the Great Depression to find numbers this bleak.

The immediate economic forecast didn’t make things easier on the Democrats, Obama, and other reform-minded zealots. It just made them more earnest. Even though Obama was trying to express otherwise, the American people knew better. Insurance was working with reluctant Republicans critical of increased government role in reform and with closeted fiscally conservative Democrats who were thinking ahead to the 2010 midterms and looking to avoid another tax-and-spend guilt by association.

[I]t is the insurers which are filling the coffers of Republicans in both chambers at a breakneck pace in an effort to sway the vote away from potential agreements that will increase tax subsidies for beneficiaries under Medicare and Medicaid, but decrease insurers’ profits with the same demographic.

For those who still don’t know how and why Insurance came out of reform virtually unscathed, they need not look any further back than this critical period in the entire reform debate. It can probably be assumed that no one really knew at the time how informative the fearmongering in some of those townhalls actually was.

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