Obama's plan would expand health insurance to tens of millions of Americans, offer subsidies to help individuals and businesses pay for coverage, remove caps on annual and lifetime benefits, and provide more preventive care at no additional charge. The president has said that his plan - with a price tag of $900 billion over 10 years - would not increase the deficit.
The road show that he'll bring to College Park at midday is the most extensive public lobbying campaign on behalf of a president's top domestic initiative since 2005. In the early months of his second term, President George W. Bush made a nationally televised appeal and visited more than two dozen cities in unsuccessful effort to prod Congress to let individuals divert part of their Social Security taxes into the stock market.
The Maryland stop represents a departure from the travel pattern of Obama's first eight months in office, centered primarily on swing states that were pivotal to his election and would likely be again in 2012.
Today, by contrast, is his first public event in heavily Democratic Maryland, other than a commencement speech in May at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. The close-by venue allows the president to continue his public push with minimal travel time.
The White House has cranked up Obama's 2008 campaign machinery to fill arenas for rallies like the one that drew about 15,000 people last weekend in Minneapolis and the event at the University of Maryland's Comcast Center, with a capacity of about 18,000. To help build a crowd, the Democratic National Committee has placed robo-calls in the Washington area and the state Democratic Party has been e-mailing members in Maryland urging Obama backers to attend.
Obama's efforts to rev up supporters are meeting with approval from a wide range of Democrats in Congress, many of whom had openly called for the president to become more heavily involved in promoting a health care overhaul.
Eastern Shore Rep. Frank Kratovil, a centrist Blue Dog Democrat, said it was "important that [Obama] continue" focusing on "the legitimate concerns that have been raised" about changing the health care system and "continuing to get a message out on some of the inaccuracies" being circulated by opponents.
Rep. Donna F. Edwards, the state's most liberal lawmaker in Washington, said Obama's efforts had "energized all of us to be able to get to 'Yes' on approving a plan.
