Portsmouth, August 12: US President Barack Obama on Tuesday condemned the wild “scare tactics” peddled by foes of his healthcare reform plan in a passionate defence of his signature domestic priority.
Obama thrust himself into the fierce public debate over his plans to bring health coverage in reach of all Americans in a campaign-style town hall meeting in New Hampshire meant to mobilise grass roots support for his plan.
“The way politics works sometimes is that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks, and they’ll create bogeymen out there that just aren’t real,” Obama said.
With a series of events this week, the President is attempting to wrest back control of the acrimonious debate from Republicans who claim his programme is too expensive and represents a government seizure of the private health system.
The showdown over healthcare, raging through normally sleepy August, has much wider implications than just the medical treatment offered to Americans.
A legislative defeat would deal a devastating political blow to Obama and likely severely curtail his political capital and chances of enacting the rest of his hugely ambitious plan to force through sweeping change.
“Let’s disagree over things that are real — not these wild representations that bear no resemblance to anything that has actually been proposed,” Obama said in the question-and-answer session.
Foes of Obama’s reform drive accuse him of plotting a government takeover of the US private healthcare system, and lawmakers who back his plans have faced a furious backlash from conservatives in their own town hall meetings.
Critics also claim Obama will raise taxes to pay for a plan they say would result in government dictating healthcare choices for Americans and lower the standard of coverage for those who do have insurance.
But Obama, hoping to offer healthcare to the 46 million Americans who currently have no insurance, attempted to cool the boiling rhetoric being blasted across cable news channels and conservative talks radio every day.
“For all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary — what is truly risky — is if we do nothing.”
Obama also rejected the notion that his plan would frame a bureaucratic “death panel” to make end-of-life choices, in an apparent reference to a Facebook post by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
“The rumour that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for death panels that will basically pull the plug on Grandma because we’ve decided that it’s too expensive to let her live anymore.”
“Somehow, it has gotten spun into this idea of death panels, I am not in favour of that, I want to clear the air here.”
–Agencies