Obama blasts opposition ‘scare tactics’ on healthcare plan

US president Barack Obama has condemned the wild “scare tactics” peddled by enemies of his healthcare reform plan in a passionate defence of his signature domestic priority.

Obama thrust himself into a 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. 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 is... personal for me,” Obama told the crowd.

“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.

“The insurance company was arguing that somehow she should have known she had cancer when she took her new job, even though it hadn’t been diagnosed yet,” Obama said.

“If it could happen to her, it could happen to any one of us.” 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 which has raged through the normally sleepy August has wider implications.

A legislative defeat on healthcare would deal a huge political blow to Obama and likely severely curtail his political capital and chances of enacting the rest of his 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... what is truly risky is if we do nothing” Obama said.

Opponents 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.

Obama also rejected the notion 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... I am not in favour of that, I want to clear the air here.”

The president said 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.