The gloves come off in health-care battle

WASHINGTON —

The health-care scare is on.

With the House of Representatives and the Senate hoping to vote on comprehensive health-care bills by the end of this month, opponents and proponents of the measures are intensifying their rhetoric and saturating the media to move public support to their sides.

The Republican National Committee unveiled an ad Monday charging that the Democratic health-care bills moving through the House and Senate are President Obama's "risky experiment with our health care."

The Republican ad joins a softer, multimillion-dollar campaign by America's Health Insurance Plans, an insurance lobbying group that wants Congress to slow the pace of health-care legislation. The group's ad urges "bipartisan reforms that Congress can build on."

Political analysts and advocates predict that the rhetoric from Obama and lawmakers combined with the ad wars from interest groups will be sharper and more superheated than the 1993 public debate over former President Clinton and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's failed health-care plan.

Some of that intensity bubbled up last week on a conference call hosted by the advocacy group Conservatives for Patients Rights when Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said that halting health legislation in Congress could help put the brakes on Obama's presidency.

"If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo," DeMint said. "It will break him."

Obama pounced on the remark Monday, issuing a statement that rebuked DeMint without identifying him.

"Think about that," the president said. "This isn't about me. This isn't about politics. This is about a health-care system that is breaking America's families, breaking America's businesses and breaking America's economy."

Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican Party, likened Obama's plans to socialism and argued that the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and key congressional committee chairmen are part of a "cabal" that wants to implement government-run health care.

Republicans — armed with Congressional Budget Office estimates that the House Democratic health-care plan would cost $1 trillion over 10 years — are taking to the airwaves, the Internet and other outlets to proclaim that Obama's health-care overhaul would be a small-business killer that would lead the country to financial ruin and create a government-run health-care system akin to those in Canada and European nations.

"We're committed to using every means at our disposal to slowing this process down," House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence of Indiana said Monday.

Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., addressing a C-SPAN audience during a recent session in the House, said: "The administration is moving as rapidly as possible towards a socialistic form of government. They're trying to control and are controlling the investment business, the banking business ... and now the health-care business."

On his Fox News talk show over the weekend, former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee warned of what he saw as the ills of the Canadian health system and featured a Canadian woman who said she had to wait nine months to see a back specialist.

Advocates of a health-care overhaul also are doling out healthy doses of scare tactics.

The Democratic National Committee announced last week that it's launching a television ad with people looking directly into the camera to talk about family health-care woes and to urge senators, "It's time for health-care reform."

The ads are slated to run in Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska and North Dakota, all of which have centrist Democratic senators.

In a sign of increasing sensitivity to parts of the plan, Pelosi is floating an idea that could make proposed tax increases more palatable to fiscally conservative Democrats. She would like to limit income-tax increases to couples making more than $1 million a year and individuals making more than $500,000, Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said Monday. The bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee last week would increase taxes on couples making as little as $350,000 a year and individuals annually making as little as $280,000.

Obama hinted for the first time that he would not let the August deadline become a deal breaker.

"If somebody comes to me and says, 'It's basically done; it's going to spill over by a few days or a week' — you know, that's different," he said Monday night on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."

Congressional Republicans intend to take their arguments against the Democratic plan to the Internet on Wednesday when House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia and other key Republican legislators appear on the center-right-leaning Pajamas TV's health-care forum.

Penni Pier, an associate communications professor at Iowa's Wartburg College, said that opponents and advocates of an overhaul are employing fear tactics because health care is a deeply personal issue that prompts a visceral response among voters in a way that few other issues do.

Pier thinks the rhetoric and vitriol over the issue won't reach 1993 levels because this time all parties agree that the health-care system needs repair.

"The Republicans acknowledge it, the Democrats acknowledge it, the American Medical Association acknowledges it," she said.

However, Darrell West, the vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a public-policy research center, said the debate was just getting started, particularly on the advertising side.

"We're not seeing the level of advertising now that we saw under Clinton," he said.

Additional material from The Associated Press and The Washington Post

is included in this report.