Obama challenges GOP healthcare critics

Will address the AMA with insurance plans

President Obama addressed healthcare issues during a town hall-style meeting yesterday in Green Bay, Wisc. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

GREEN BAY, Wis. - Undertaking a new and aggressive push to enact a sweeping healthcare plan this year, President Obama bluntly challenged Republican critics yesterday to put forward their own plan to expand coverage to the uninsured and help struggling families afford care.

"To those who criticize our efforts, I ask them, 'What's the alternative?' " Obama said at a town hall-style meeting, surrounded by supportive citizens in the heartland.

"What else do we say to all those families who spend more on health care than on housing or on food? What do we tell those businesses that are choosing between closing their doors and letting their workers go?"

A dispute over Obama's desire to create a new government-sponsored health plan to compete with private insurers is forming a major obstacle to bipartisan consensus. There also remain major disagreements over how to pay for the $1.5 trillion it will cost over the next decade to cover uninsured Americans, and whether to require employers to offer coverage.

Obama described his critics as naysayers, saying, "I can assure you that doing nothing will cost us far more in the coming years." But he also said he won't run roughshod over Congress with a "my way or the highway" approach and is "happy to steal other people's ideas."

Green Bay resident Laura Klitzka, 35, a married mother of two who has breast cancer that has now spread to her bones, introduced Obama at the town hall. She carries about $12,000 in unpaid medical bills that continue to pile up as treatment continues that she said her family cannot afford.

The White House considers such emotional pleas critical to selling reform. Obama's political arm, the grass-roots machine known as Organizing for America, has collected hundreds of thousands of similar stories that could shame lawmakers who don't sign on.

But the brief ride from the airport to the high school where he spoke featured a rare sight for the new president: a large gathering of protesters.

Signs held among the several hundred demonstrators lining his route said "NObama" and "No to Socialism."

Back in Washington, Republicans assailed any inclusion of a public insurance option in a new system of expanded healthcare. "We see that as a slippery slope to having the government run everything," Senator Mike Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, said at a news conference.

But Obama, answering a question, said no one - "certainly not me" - is interested in a nationalized healthcare system, like that in Great Britain. "When you hear people saying socialized medicine, understand, I don't know anybody in Washington who is proposing that," he said.

Still, opposition is building to the direction of proposals from Obama and fellow Democrats.

The US Chamber of Commerce is convening business groups today to plot strategy. A chamber vice president, Randy Johnson, said that though business groups have been largely restrained to date about voicing opposition, it might be time for that to change. Johnson testified yesterday at a Senate hearing where he expressed strong opposition to Democratic proposals to require employers to purchase health care for their employees.

Obama will also face some foes to his healthcare proposals in Chicago on Monday, when he addresses the American Medical Association, the nation's largest doctors group, which is wary of a public insurance plan.

But the AMA now represents barely one-fourth of the nation's physicians, and just how much that body can sway Obama's health reform efforts will be a test of its once mighty clout.

Asked about the AMA's stand, White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters yesterday: "He knew at the beginning of this process that people would oppose and support different elements that were on and off the table, and this is just one part of the process." He's going to talk to the AMA on Monday, and thinks that we'll be able to have an open and honest dialogue about the issues that we're all very concerned about."

By Philip Elliott - Globe Newspaper Company.

CORY DELLENBACH / AP

Photo: Kennedy Corpus, 10, holds a note President Obama gave to her Thursday.

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What a note: Kennedy Corpus, 10, has a rock-solid excuse for missing the last day of school: a personal note to her teacher from President Obama. Her father, John Corpus, of Green Bay, Wis., stood to ask Obama about health care and mentioned that his daughter was missing school to attend the event. "Do you need me to write a note?" Obama asked. He wrote: "To Kennedy's teacher: Please excuse Kennedy's absence. She's with me. Barack Obama." He stepped off the stage to hand-deliver the note. "It was like the best thing ever," the fourth-grader said later.