However, Obama has put the process into overdrive and that is what is getting normally quiet people out to protest.

What is getting normally quiet people out to protest are fallacious sound-bites like Death Panels, lies about socialized medicine (a term that was coined by the AMA once upon a time when it was opposed to the principle. It isn't any more. Doesn't that tell you something?) and blaming the government because care for the elderly costs more than for fit young people and keeps rising as the elderly population rises. If your insurance premiums had to cover care for the elderly, fwiw, the premium increase would far exceed the tax expenditure... yet people insist on focusing on the Medicare/Medicaid tax $ as if it were an avoidable cost.

IMHO Obama's mistake is to try to debate, apparently a losing strategy against the soundbiters. So be it. IMHO he needs to be hammering away with soundbites about healthcare bills as the biggest cause of bankruptcies for productive, insured middle-class Americans who may believe they have their risks covered. He should be asking hollering sign-wavers whether they are next, and who they will blame if they are. He needs to show a graph with rising real costs in each of the options- a graph that can be put on a sign and waved in the face of somebody whose "facts" consist of a picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache. He needs to be delivering soundbite after soundbite and possibly even visiting centers of excellence in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland (not France because some of the Hitler-accusers may still resent the Retreat-Monkies for denying there were WMD in Iraq) and then briefly discussing how that level of care is funded. We need to remember that many US citizens have never been outside its borders and even "experts" on TV may think that Europeans live in Dickensian conditions.

BTW, earlier you mentioned the UK NHS: the NHS is expected to post a *huge* deficit this year, an event that will be presented as a predictable failure of nationalized care. But actually it is an index of rising need and cost of care with input far exceeded by expenditure. All first world nations face this and we all need to make decisions about increasing input or reducing expenditure. Reducing expenditure seems to growing in popularity. Call it "rationing" if you like, though it's far more likely to involve you and your own physician in the UK than in the US where a distant clerk may be empowered to decline funding or cancel your policy.