President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don’t would not amount to a backhanded tax increase. “I absolutely reject that notion,” the president said.

Blanketing most of the Sunday TV news shows, Obama defended his proposed health care overhaul, including a key point of the various health care bills on Capitol Hill: mandating that people get health insurance to share the cost burden fairly among all. Those who failed to get coverage would face financial penalties.

Obama said other elements of the plan would make insurance affordable for people, from a new comparison-shopping “exchange” to tax credits.

Telling people to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase, Obama told ABC’s “This Week.”

“What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore,” said Obama. “Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.”

Obama faces an enormous political and communications challenge in selling his health care plan as Congress debates how to pay for it all.

He told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he will keep his pledge not to raise taxes on families earning up to $250,000, and that much of the final bill — hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years — can be achieved from savings within the current system. Coming up with the rest remains a key legislative obstacle.

Obama put his support behind the idea of taxing employers that offer high-cost insurance plans.

“I do think that giving a disincentive to insurance companies to offer Cadillac plans that don’t make people healthier is part of the way that we’re going to bring down health care costs for everybody over the long term,” Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Obama’s network interviews were taped Friday at the White House. He became the first president to appear on five Sunday network shows in the same morning, an extraordinary effort to build public support for his top domestic priority.

The goal is expand and improve health insurance coverage and rein in long-term costs.

Yet despite so many weeks of speeches, town halls and interviews, Obama said he has found it difficult at times to make a complex topic clear and relevant.

“I’ve tried to keep it digestible,” Obama said. “It’s very hard for people to get their arms around it. And that’s been a case where I have been humbled and I just keep on trying harder.”

Obama told Univision’s “Al Punto” (”To the Point”) that the strong opposition to his plan is part of a political strategy.

“Well, part of it is … that the opposition has made a decision,” he said. “They are just not going to support anything, for political reasons.”

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Obama doesn’t understand Republicans’ opposition.

“I don’t know anybody in my Republican conference in the Senate who’s in favor of doing nothing on health care,” McConnell said. “We obviously have a cost problem and we have an access problem.”

But he told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Democrats’ plan is simply too rushed.

After less than eight months in office, President Barack Obama’s administration is under serious scrutiny by some leading immigrant advocates.

As the legislative drive for health care insurance reform picks up steam, pro-immigrant groups are increasingly alarmed by proposals that target both documented and undocumented resident of the US.

In a telephonic press conference September 16, Latino rights, religious and political leaders blasted policy ideas circulating around the White House and Capitol Hill as not only an attack on the immigrant community

but a threat to public health as well.

“We’ve been deeply disturbed by developments in the health care debate and the treatment of immigrants in it,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the Washington, D.C-based Americas Voice immigrant advocacy organization.

Sharry criticized Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana), President Obama and Democrats for bending over backwards to accommodate political opponents, especially Republicans like shouting South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, who “demonize immigrants.”

Sharry and other pro-immigrant leaders said they were deeply concerned by measures unveiled in the Senate Finance Committee and in other quarters on Capitol Hill that would exclude immigrants from participating in an insurance exchange even with their own money, prevent children of undocumented residents from getting coverage, probe the residency status of emergency room patients, and make verification of residency status an expanded, cumbersome process for both citizens and non-citizens alike.

According to Eric Rodriguez, vice-president of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) an estimated 7 of 28 million legal immigrants do not have health insurance.

Under the plan released by Senator Baucus today, undocumented immigrants, who will be virtually barred from obtaining any kind of health insurance at all, would face fines of $950 and upwards if they managed to obtain any sort of emergency treatment.

US Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois) voiced dismay that the White House was considering keeping many immigrants out of the insurance exchange, especially after Gutierrez and other members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus agreed that no public monies or tax credits could be used by undocumented residents in a new health insurance reform scheme.

Gutierrez contended that prohibiting undocumented residents from being in the exchange even with their own cash could result in masses of people losing their health insurance coverage.

“What about millions of undocumented workers who have health care through their employers?” Gutierrez asked. “Are they going to lose their benefits?”

“Health care policies should not be dictated by a heckler,” said NCLR President Janet Murguia, in a separate statement also made on September 16. Despite some improvements in the plan announced by Sen. Baucus,

Murguia warned that the legislation coming out of the Senate Finance Committee had the potential to “drive up costs, leave people uncovered and threaten public health.”

Kevin Appleby, director of migrant policy for the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, said that the Church, one of the largest health care providers in the country, often provides treatment to immigrants. The migrant

advocate characterized the denial of health care to sick people as a “fool-hardy” and “mean-spirited” policy. Asserting that the Obama Administration had “capitulated” to anti-immigrant forces, Appleby said

that elected officials had sacrificed public health care on the altar on politics.

Rev. Luis Cortes, president of Esperanza USA, said that it wasn’t too long ago when widespread concern surfaced about the H1N1 virus, but that current proposals on the table would jeopardize people in dire need of health care.

Both political parties, Cortes contended, are “running the fastest to see who is the harshest.” Judging looming actions by Congress and the White House, as “morally punishable by Christian scripture,” Cortes said that the political price could be high for Democrats as well as Republicans. Adding that the immigrant community was once hopeful of the Democrats, Cortes said that local elections would have to be examined “one-by-one” in the future.

Numerous analysts consider New American voters, immigrants and their children, a key voting bloc that swept the Democrats into the White House and Congress last year. Many pro-immigrant groups are growing increasingly frustrated by the pace of immigration reform promised by presidential candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign.

Speaking to reporters, Rep. Gutierrez recalled how the Latino community was inspired by Obama’ candidacy, and took to heart the fellow Illinois Democrat’s pledge to bring undocumented workers out of the shadows and on to the path of legalization. “That’s the President I voted for, not the one who says you cannot have health care,” Gutierrez said.

The longtime Latino political leader and other participants of the September 16 press conference called for the end of “wedge” politics and the passage of comprehensive immigration reform.

Chad asked:

When Cary Hicks lost his group health insurance earlier this year, he was floored by how much an individual policy could cost him because he is a diabetic.

“I was looking for anything,” said Hicks, who runs a small construction company. “I didn’t have insurance. I couldn’t afford any.”

That’s when Hicks discovered a new public health insurance program created by the North Carolina legislature. He now pays $550 a month in premiums — not cheap, but one-third of what a similar policy would have cost him in the private market.

As Congress debates how to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, North Carolina has dipped its toe into the public-option debate. Those who can’t find affordable health insurance from private companies because they have cancer, heart disease or other ailments now have the option of buying insurance from a high-risk pool set up by the state.

The program, called Inclusive Health, is little known. It has enrolled 2,050, only half of the number expected. But an estimated 1.4 million North Carolinians don’t have health insurance.

Inclusive Health is aimed largely at helping middle-class people who wake up one morning and find themselves without health insurance. Enrollees have either been turned down by private insurance companies, have lost their jobs or don’t have access to Medicare or Medicaid.

Hicks, 54, of Garner, said he had never given much thought to health insurance before this year. He was covered under his wife’s policy until January, when her employer, Corporate Press, a 40-year-old Raleigh printing company, went out of business. His construction company, which mainly builds fences, was too small to afford health insurance.

Bad luck sometimes comes in bunches. Hicks, who had not been hospitalized in 12 years, got an infected elbow in March, and the infection spread to his bloodstream. It put him the hospital for a week — a $12,000 out-of-pocket expense.

After a taste of being uninsured, Hicks went shopping for a health insurance policy. But because he is a severe diabetic, and therefore viewed as a high risk, the cost was prohibitive. Hicks said the state’s biggest insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, which has 86 percent of individual health insurance policies in the state, offered a policy with a $1,648 monthly premium. Hicks said that was unaffordable at a time when his household had gone from two incomes to one.

“We’ve got to eat, and we’ve got a house payment,” Hicks said. “It was just too much to handle.”

He saw a brief item in The News & Observer about the start of a new state health insurance program. Within a month, he had enrolled in Inclusive Health. His premium is $550 per month, and it covers his three daily shots of insulin, his blood pressure medicine and other medical costs.

North Carolina became the 35th state to create a high-risk health insurance plan in 2007, after a decade of debate in the legislature. It began offering insurance policies in January.

The measure had the backing of health groups, physicians, hospitals and insurance agents.

Adam Searing, a health-care consumer expert, said North Carolina’s high-risk pool is relatively industry friendly compared with those in other states. It includes a restriction that the risk pool charge premiums 175 percent of what private insurers charge, so as not to compete with private markets. And it provides no subsidies for the poor.

While it helps middle-class people without insurance, it is of little use