WASHINGTON: The health care reforms currently being debated have caused a national uproar by opponents who believe the reforms are at best an ill-conceived and rushed expansion of government spending in the midst of major economic problems and at worst a wicked liberal plot to euthanize the elderly and disabled.
Entering into the fray, and taking on the same kind of often-hostile so-called “town hall meetings” that members of Congress have endured for much of August, President Barack Obama left on Friday the refuge of his blue-state constituency and headed out West to more conservative and politically hostile territory.
Obama was scheduled yesterday afternoon to meet an audience in Montana. Today he is scheduled for a stop at another conservative stronghold, Colorado. By the time this leg of his tour is through, he will likely need his annual vacation that is scheduled for next week.
Facing questions about whether public support for the health overhaul initiative is sagging, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the problem was rooted in misconceptions spread by political opponents.
One of the most inflammatory charges has been that Obama and Democrats were seeking to implement so-called “death panels,” with bureaucrats making decisions about whether elderly or seriously ill patients live or die.
The allegation stems in part from a Republican-sponsored provision in a bill that would provide Medicare reimbursement to patients seeking end-of-life counseling.
On Thursday, lawmakers working on the Senate version said that provision had been dropped from their proposal.
In a counterweight tactic to critics who have shouted down Democratic lawmakers at town hall meetings, encounters that have received heavy news coverage, a coalition of groups backing Obama’s proposals launched a $12-million TV ad campaign Thursday.
Obama reacted to the heated meetings this week by asking Americans not to listen to people who seek to “scare and mislead the American people.”
He also attempted to attract the tens of millions of people who already have health insurance and are fine with their care.
Former President Bill Clinton, meanwhile, stepped into the fray this week by saying Republicans have turned to terrifying people in the debate over health-care reform because the GOP has no political clout to fight it.
Clinton was president when the Democrats made their last major effort to change the system. The big difference now, he says is that Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate as well as control of the House.
The former president said the charges were “crazy” that promoting living wills and other end-of-life planning is somehow promoting state-sponsored euthanasia.
But people are stoked up about the issue.
Police in Maryland on Thursday questioned a 51-year-old man who had held up a homemade cardboard sign that read “Death to Obama. Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids.” at a forum on health-care reform there.
He was detained and questioned by Secret Service agents.
The incident is not the first that has drawn national attention in Maryland. A cardboard cutout of Rep. Frank Kratovil, a first-term Democrat, was hung in effigy at a protest last month. Outside the gathering, reform opponents also handed out fliers depicting Obama as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. And even in more liberal New Hampshire, where it is legal to openly carry weapons, a man with a loaded gun strapped to his thigh held up a sign saying “Time to water the tree of liberty,” a reference to a saying by Thomas Jefferson about liberty needing the blood of patriots and tyrants in order to thrive.
