Bill Neel was angry as the loud but peaceful rally and protest march against the Iraq War and for universal health care broke up in Market Square yesterday.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Pete Shell, left, of Squirrel Hill, marches down Grant Street following the "Healthcare Not Warfare" rally Downtown in support of Pennsylvanians United for Single-Payer Healthcare. About 400 people participated in the rally and were joined by a dozen Bush supporters who oppose government-subsidized health care. Click photo for larger image.

On an afternoon full of sunshine and irony, the 66-year-old Butler resident was in charge of the "peace marshals," enlisted to help keep order during the event, but found himself toe-to-toe and jawing heatedly with Eric Janzer, one of less than a dozen pro-Bush supporters who crashed the event to lend a pinch of political diversity to the crowd of 400.

"Coward," charged the finger-pointing Neel.

"Hypocrite," responded Janzer, his lip quivering.

What got Neel, a veteran of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, riled was Janzer's staunch support of the war but lack of military credentials.

"The Bush people are all summer soldiers who want the poor to fight their wars and want their children to pay for it," Neel said afterward. "I was a peace marshal but I'm allowed to get angry now. All of us should be angry. What this administration has done is made us all enemies and united the world against us."

Janzer, 24, of the North Side, said Neel's opposition to the war was hypocritical and responded to Neel's cowardice charge by saying that he tried to enlist, even lied to get into the service, but they wouldn't take him because of his asthmatic condition.

"I don't believe that health care has anything to do with warfare," said Janzer, referring to the rally's "Healthcare Not Warfare" theme.

Janzer, who is a student at Duffs Business Institute, also doesn't believe that government should provide universal health care coverage, even though his health coverage is provided by the government through welfare.

"I believe that medical coverage should be lower costing but not free,'' Janzer said. "The former Soviet Union tried that and it didn't work." Medical coverage through welfare should be a stepping stone but people shouldn't live off of it and I don't think everyone should have it. Ideally, everyone should pay for their own."

But Neel, who is retired from his job as an electrician at Armco Steel in Butler, said some form of single-payer health coverage is essential.

"I have single-payer health coverage," Neel said, "and it was very important when my children were growing up so they could get health care and we could still put some money aside for their college.''

The noon rally, organized by the Thomas Merton Center on behalf of Pennsylvanians United for Single-Payer Healthcare, featured a half-dozen pro-universal health care, anti-war speakers who were united in support of better health care and condemnation of the Bush administration.

"My members have gone to jail in an effort to get health coverage, but I haven't seen the Bush administration do anything for health care,'' said Gabe Morgan, a leader of the Service Employees International Union and its Justice for Janitors campaign.

"Perhaps there is no better example of the horrendously misplaced priorities of the current administration," said Neal Bisno, a SEIU Local 1199P leader, "than the expenditure of billions of our tax dollars on an illegal, unjust and deadly war in Iraq while 44 million Americans lack access to health care in this country."

But Robert Katon of Ross, one of the Bush supporters in the crowd, said the government shouldn't be in the health care business, especially if it means "taking part of my paycheck."

"Emergency health care is widely available to indigent people in this country," said Katon, an Internet network analyst. "I don't think it's the crisis they make it out to be."

Aaron Marks, 16, of Franklin Park, chairman of the Northern Allegheny County Teenage Republicans and leader of the beleaguered encampment of Bush supporters, said they attended the rally because he believes conservatives should have a voice.

"The war in Iraq is just," Marks said. "I don't support socialized health care and Medicare and Medicaid are a mess. But no one is changing anyone's minds here today."

That's especially true of Billionaires for Bush, a street theater group that uses humor and formal wear to call attention to what it says are the Bush administration's disastrous economic policies. It said the administration's fiscal 2005 budget proposal would double the cost of veterans' prescription drug co-payments and falls $2.6 billion short in funding veterans' health care.

"That's $2.6 billion more for our tax cuts," said Kathy Merletti, whose street theater name is Emma Goldmine.