Debate over US healthcare reform takes an ugly turn

The health debate in the US is taking an ugly turn with Barack Obama and other Democrats pushing reform being compared with Nazis and one congressman having a swastika daubed outside his office.

The FBI is investigating the swastika that the staff of the congressman, David Scott, found painted on a sign bearing his name near the entrance to his office in Smyrna, Georgia.

The police hope that the incident might have been picked up on surveillance cameras.

The incident came less than a week after a rowdy town hall meeting in which Scott was involved in acrimonious exchanges with critics of Obama's proposed health reform.

In a separate incident, police admitted they were helpless to do anything about a man who openly carried a gun outside the venue where Obama addressed a public meeting on the health issue at Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday.

The man, William Kostric, held up a sign reading "it is time to water the tree of liberty," an apparent reference to a letter written by Thomas Jefferson that the tree of liberty "must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants".

Police kept close watch on him but were unable to intervene because the law in New Hampshire allows firearms to be carried in public. Police were also hampered by the fact that Kostric was on private property at the time, a church near the public meeting. Also outside the meeting, a woman held a sign with Obama's face superimposed on a Nazi stormtrooper.

Such reactions reflect the emotions aroused by health reform, one of the most divisive issues in US politics of the last two decades. Meetings of members of Congress trying to sell Obama's call for health reform have frequently been disrupted. Some members of Congress have cancelled plans for further meetings but others pushed ahead today.

Obama, trying to win back ground lost to conservative opponents over the last month, is to return to the fray on Friday and over the weekend with further town hall meetings in Montana and elsewhere in the west.

Some recent opinion polls have suggested that Obama has lost popularity, down from the mid-60s or higher he enjoyed during his first six months in office to an approval rating of around 55%. But a Gallup poll published today found that opinions on healthcare had no significant shift over the last three weeks, with 49% saying they disapproved of Obama's desire to introduce healthcare reform and 43% approving. The poll was conducted last week. A similar one in the middle of last month had 50% disapproving and 44% approving.

The congressman who had the swastika painted outside his office is to ask the police for increased protection for himself and his family. Scott received hate mail after angrily denouncing healthcare critics at a meeting that received widespread television coverage in the US. He told the Associated Press that the swastika was probably intended as a warning and expressed hope that it will persuade reasonable people to maintain a more substantive debate. He said: "We must not allow it to intimidate us."

The Anti-Defamation League condemned the swastika paint job as a "frightening display of bigotry and ignorance that should not be tolerated by a democratic society."

The incident came after the rightwing talk show host Rush Limbaugh last week described Obama's healthcare logo as "right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook".

The campaigning on both sides will intensify over the next few weeks. Obama has set October as the deadline for having a healthcare bill on his desk for signing but in order to meet that the Senate will have to begin finalising work on the legislation by the middle of next month.

As part of the intensification, the US Chamber of Commerce today began airing 30-second adverts opposing health reform across 20 states. The ad concentrates on concerns that the expansion of healthcare coverage to the 50 million uninsured in the US will stretch an already inflated federal budget. It shows a balloon bursting, and predicts big tax increases and huge deficits.