CLIFTON • President Obama brought his health care reform message to the Western Slope on Saturday, telling a polite and mostly supportive town hall crowd in this Grand Junction suburb that his proposals will help insured Americans, not just the 46 million who don’t have health insurance.

Trying to reverse declining public support for his plan for mandatory health insurance and a government-run “public option” to help provide it, Obama said he wants to protect people from premium increases and coverage caps.

Almost 90 percent of insurance plans have lifetime benefit limits, and insurance premiums are rising, robbing workers of their pay increases, he said.

“We’re going to ban arbitrary caps on benefits,” he told an audience of 1,600. “We’ll place limits on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses. No American should go broke because they get sick.”

Introducing Obama was Nathan Wilkes, a Western Coloradan and former Democratic candidate for the state Senate. He talked about the financial devastation his family suffered after their son was diagnosed with hemophilia and he was socked with huge increases in his insurance premiums. “My family needs health insurance reform,” he said.

Obama said it’s middle-class people like Wilkes whose health care plans fail them. “It’s wrong, and we’re going to fix it when we pass health insurance reform this year,” he said, to big applause and cheers.

Obama disputed those who say his plan would put the government between people and their doctors.

“I don’t want government bureaucrats meddling in your health care, but the point is I don’t want insurance company bureaucrats meddling in your health care either,” he said to raucous cheers.

Though there were scattered boos, the event was free of confrontation. Obama’s toughest question came from Zach Lane, who identified himself as a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder and asked how private insurers could compete with a tax-exempt, government-run plan.

Obama said the system could be crafted to make a level playing field, noting that “UPS and FedEx are doing a lot better than the post office” and that two-thirds of the cost of the program could be saved by efficiencies.

He said opposition to his plan is being whipped up by people seeking “to preserve the status quo by scaring the American people.” He got a standing ovation when he said that those who assert that the health proposals will create federal “death panels” that will “pull the plug on grandma” are being “simply dishonest.”

Supporters and opponents lined the road outside the meeting, held in the gymnasium of Central High School. Several hundred pro-reform demonstrators lined one side of the road; opponents, fewer in number, were on the other. No incidents were reported.

Obama could have faced a far more hostile reception. Mesa County, of which Grand Junction is the seat, was overwhelmingly Republican in November 2008, when nearly 64 percent of the voters favored Sen. John McCain.

Chuck Broerman, a former chairman of the El Paso County Republican Party, and Jeff Crank, state chairman of a conservative activist group, attended a morning rally in Grand Junction opposing health care reform. Both wondered how a meeting in such a conservative area could have produced a pro-Obama crowd if, as the White House said, tickets were issued at random to online applicants.—Contact the writer at 476-1654

President Barack Obama talks about health care during a town hall meeting in Grand Junction, on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009. Photo by AP Photo/Ed Andrieski