Obama slams healthcare 'scare' tactics

US President Barack Obama on Tuesday condemned the wild "scare tactics" peddled by foes of his healthcare reform plan in a passionate defense 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 mobilize 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.

Obama also recounted the story of his own mother, Ann Dunham, who lost her fight to cancer nearly a decade and a half ago as she battled insurance companies.

"It's... personal for me," Obama told the crowd Tuesday.

"I will never forget my own mother as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for her treatment," he told the crowd.

"The insurance company was arguing that somehow she should have known that she had cancer when she took her new job, even though it hadn't been diagnosed yet," Obama told the New Hampshire audience Tuesday.

"If it could happen to her, it could happen to any one of us. And I've heard from so many Americans who have the same worries."

With a series of events this week, the president is attempting to wrest back control of the acrimonious debate from Republicans who claim his program 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 rumor 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 favor of that, I want to clear the air here."

The president said that the confusion had arisen out of an initiative in the House of Representatives to allow elderly patients to be reimbursed from a federal health plan for consultations about hospice and end-of-life care.

Obama's healthcare meeting was conducted in good humor, and with even those who disagreed with him showing deference habitually given to a president.

But the mood was more ugly for other lawmakers who found themselves shouted down and targeted by angry audiences at townhall meetings elsewhere.

In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Senator Arlen Specter, a former Republican who switched to the Democratic Party, was harangued by an emotional woman who charged the government was trying to hijack private healthcare.

"I'm a Republican, it isn't about the health care system, it's about turning the country into Russia, into a socialist country," she said.

"When are you going to restore this country back like the fathers founded it according to the constitution?"

Obama had hoped that Congress would vote on healthcare reform before its current summer break, but the initiative got bogged down in the ferocious political struggle, with his opponents dictating the terms of debate.

There are currently three bills being framed in various committees of the House of Representatives and two others being written in the Senate, setting up a period of fierce horse trading before any legislation can come to a vote.

Many Democrats fear they could be living through a repeat of former president Bill Clinton's unsuccessful healthcare reform drive, which never even came to a vote in Congress and severely wounded his first-term administration.