Howard Dean and Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) thought they could get away with it.

They thought they could hold a health care town hall meeting.

And exclude single payer advocates from the event.

And in fact they tried.

They said that because of the limited number of seats in the room, they would have a lottery.

But lo and behold, only a handful of single payer advocates won a seats in the Dean/Blumenauer lottery.

For the most part, single payer advocates were locked out.

Both Dean and Blumenauer oppose single payer health.

Both want to keep the health insurance corporations in the game.

Single payer would kick them out.

So, Dean and Blumenauer held their so called town hall meeting.

And more than 50 single payer advocates gathered outside in the rain.

And they let Dean and Blumenauer them have it from the outside.

It was a veritable Oregon uprising for single payer.

The uprising was organized Friday June 5 at Portland Community College by Single Payer Action’s Philip Kauffman.

Protesters surrounded the building an hour before the 3:30 start time hoping to confront Blumenauer and Dean as they entered the
building.

As Blumenauer’s entourage approached the auditorium, a handful of activists made it around police and sat down in the path of the
Congressman.

Blumenauer and his entourage stepped over the protesters.

Other protesters called on Blumenauer to open the “town hall” meeting to single payer advocates.

Dean received the same treatment as he approached the entrance and shrugged his head when asked why the Democrats won’t put single payer on the table.

As the event began, protesters chanted — single payer now.

Rumors flew that Multnomah County Democrats, a group that campaigned heavily for Blumenauer during his reelection campaign, had received tickets outside of the raffle system and that seats remained empty in the auditorium.

Protesters entered the auditorium building and demanded entrance into the Town Hall event.

They were told they could not enter without tickets.

Over a dozen activists chanted at the top of their lungs to be let in as half a dozen police officers blocked the entrance to the auditorium.

When Single Payer Action’s Kauffman was asked to stop the activists from being so loud, he refused and was escorted out of the lobby by a police officer.

Kauffman was then told he would be charged with criminal trespass upon re-entry.

Single payer activist Harry Kershner was escorted from the building and told he was not allowed back on the property.

When Kershner asked “Upon whose authority?”, he was arrested and taken a few blocks away for processing.

Kershner was charged with criminal trespass.

He is scheduled to be arraigned later this month.

Other activists were then barred from re-entering the lobby by police officers at the door.

Over a dozen officers waited in the parking lot across the street — presumably for an order to remove the activists from the
lobby.

That order call never came down and a dozen activists kept chanting right outside the auditorium doors for the duration of the event.

A small group of activists were able to confront Dean and Blumenauer as they left, chasing them out of a back door as they got into a car and drove away.

Those inside the auditorium later said that they could hear the single payer chanting and Dean mentioned that although the protesters outside may be “obnoxious” they were driving the debate for healthcare reform “to the far left.”

(See Single Payer Action video of event here.)

In a blog posting, single payer activist Joe Walsh wrote that he was “ashamed that I had spent 40 years in the Democratic Party, and was glad I finally left it in disappointment.”

“This meeting was modeled after the Bush/Cheney idea of a Town Hall — control the tickets, load the place with party officials, and exclude any real people who might ask the hard questions.”