Web Video: Health care debate sparks angry Congressional town halls in 2009

WILLIAMS: When members of Congress head home for the summer, their meetings with constituents are seldom a hot ticket. They're typically quiet gatherings with perennial questions about cutting taxes and fixing potholes, but not this summer. It's been hard to tell the televised town hall meetings on health care from reruns of Jerry Springer.
President Obama has responded by pushing extra hard for what he says will be the largest reform effort ever for health care with three town halls just this week in New Hampshire, Montana, and Colorado. An especially controversial provision is something called "end-of-life counseling." The rumors and the questions have been putting lawmakers on the defensive.
Q: The Democrats tell us all the time that it's the right of every American to have health care, yet it seems as this Obama plan will systematically deny those rights to certain groups like the elderly.
SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY (R-IA): We should not have a government program that determines you're going to pull the plug on grandma.
Q: What it says is as a 74-year-old man, if you developed cancer, we're pretty much going to write you off.
SEN. ARLEN SPECTER (D-PA): Well, you're just not right. Nobody 74 is going to be written off because they have cancer. That's a vicious, malicious, untrue rumor.
WILLIAMS: So have questions like this derailed the administration's plan to sell health care, Janet?
HOOK: Well, they haven't derailed it, but they've certainly taken it in -- the debate in a direction that nobody had expected and it put the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress on the defensive on topics that they were not really expecting to come up. These town hall meetings and the legion of attack ads that have been put up on TV and radio, they're all very shrill and partisan and singularly uninformative. And unfortunately they've been -- the vehicle of that and internet traffic has been the vehicle for distortions and misleading claims and this end-of-life debate is the classic example.
What could be more frightening to the elderly population, which are an important constituency in the health care system and the political system, than finding out that they're going to pull the plug on you?
KITFIELD: We've seen Obama talk a lot this week. Is he trying to regain the message, the momentum? Did he have any luck with that or any signs that they've got back on message and sort of steered the debate back to where they wanted?
HOOK: Well, it certainly is the case that he kind of jumped right into the debate this week in a way that he hadn't before. And he did seem a little bit taken back by how much blowback there was on the bill. And it wasn't just on these marginal issues.
There's been a big pushback on the question of how deeply involved the federal government's going to get. So he's out there in these town hall meetings and I've got to say they were more like campaign events than like a town meeting. And the questions were all rather friendly, not nearly as confrontational as the kinds of questions that we just saw Senator Specter getting.
DUFFY: There were some indications this week that that provision that was so controversial on the advisory -- the end-of-life advisory subsidies -- will actually now fall out, which would suggest that the opponents, however ill-informed, misinformed, or treacherous they were, succeeded.
HOOK: That may be the case. Senator Chuck Grassley -- he is a very important person in the negotiations because he's one of the few Republicans who's still at the table. And he indicated this week that he thought that that wasn't going to be in the Senate bill. Now, maybe by the time they get around to writing the final bill, it will have blown over. But it is the case sometimes that in search of a big policy change, a little -- one corner of it gets in the way and sometimes members of Congress just say, "not worth the trouble."
ZACHARIA: What's the game plan here? Are they going to continue with these mud-wrestling town halls do you think the Democrats and the White House, or try something else?
HOOK: Well, they'll probably do it through August because Congress isn't in session and that's why they're all back home and trying to persuade their constituents of their various points of view on the health care. And what I don't know is whether the blowback against what Obama is trying to do is so strong that they can do nothing but play defense. It's really remarkable to have the president of the United States have to put up a website that's a reality check or say "these are myths about what I'm trying to do." He has the bully pulpit and it's remarkable that the terms of debate were taken away from him.