WEST MEMPHIS, Ark. -- The subject under discussion is President Clinton's prescription for health-care reform, and the crowd is getting sicker by the minute.
"I just want to ask you this," small businesswoman Dorothy Crone asks Rep. Blanche Lambert at a meeting in this Lower Mississippi River Delta community of 28,000. "When - when the government is involved - have the costs ever gone down?"
"If we have a large bureaucracy delivering health care," adds Joe Dooley, a John Deere farm equipment dealer, "I think we're going to have a lot of problems."
Lambert, 33, a moderate Democrat in her first term in Congress, listens patiently before launching her response, a tepid defense of the evolving plan proposed by her president and fellow Arkansan.
She says she opposes mandatory purchasing cooperatives, isn't married to the requirement that employers buy insurance for their workers, and doubts caps on premiums will survive. "I'm not here to advocate the president's plan," Lambert assures wary constituents.
But when she tells them that her House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by powerful Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., is rewriting Clinton's complex scheme in order to "not create a government bureaucracy," the crowd of 100 erupts in skeptical groans. That prompts Small Business Administration chief Erskine Bowles to retort, "I refuse to be characterized as the enemy."
It's nasty out there for White House pitchmen and the fence-sitting lawmakers they're wooing beyond Washington's Beltway during this two-week congressional recess.
"Let's face it," Lambert sighs, munching pretzels as she glances out her car window en route to a low-income clinic in Marianna. "Change is hard for anybody. Just getting my daddy to recycle is difficult."
As a swing vote on a key committee, Lambert is among those who hold the key to health-care legislation this year. She's not alone.
Next door in Oklahoma, two Democrats whose votes are up for grabs on two other committees also faced voters at a forum last week, as protesters marched outside with signs opposing government intrusion in health care:
-- Democratic Rep. Bill Brewster, 52, whose "Little Dixie" district in southeast Oklahoma spans 21 counties, got warm applause when he told constituents the best reform would be "incremental."
Brewster, the only pharmacist in the House, demonstrated he'll be a hard sell even for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill. Despite recent meetings with both the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Brewster opposes their proposed employer mandate, premium caps and mandatory purchasing groups.
"I have no one coming to me saying, 'You guys have got to pass the president's plan,' " Brewster says at a stop in Oklahoma City. His constituents express more fear than hope about their ability to receive quality care from the doctor of their choice in the future, he says.
-- Democratic Sen. David Boren, 52, who led the fight against Clinton's failed energy tax last year after Brewster had forced changes in it, told more than 1,000 people at the forum that only a "bipartisan, consensus approach" would suffice.
Boren - perhaps the least loyal Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which his party controls 11-9 - wants to broker a new deal on health care. And voters in Oklahoma appear to be on his side.
In a show of hands, Clinton's proposed mandate that employers pay for insurance - and a Republican proposal that individuals be required to buy it - got almost no support. Most preferred a mix or no mandate at all, even if the goal of coverage for everyone was sacrificed.
"They do not want too much government control," Boren said after the seven-hour forum, where conservatives such as he, Brewster and GOP Sen. Don Nickles were cheered more than White House health guru Ira Magaziner. Boren's preference: a "hybrid" between employer and individual mandate, with benefits phased in and small firms protected.
Lambert, Brewster and Boren will be lobbied mightily by the White House and interest groups during the next two months, as will a half-dozen lawmakers on each of their panels.
The pressure is coming from both sides in the health debate:
-- Groups opposed to the Clinton plan, such as the National Federation of Independent Business, are calling and writing lawmakers in key states and districts. Lambert, for instance, is getting a lot of attention.
"We consider her to be key to the whole thing," says federation lobbyist John Motley. "We have at least 1,500 members in that district, including some of her relatives."
-- Groups pushing Clinton's plan, such as the Health Care Reform Project, are airing TV ads and organizing phone banks and mailings in the districts of key House members.
"This congressional recess could well prove to be one of the most decisive moments in the whole health-care reform debate," says Charlie Leonard, spokesman for the project.
Brewster and Lambert appear ready to make decisions - in opposite directions. Brewster would have trouble voting for anything with far-reaching elements like universal coverage or employer mandates. Lambert seems satisfied that the eventual proposal will be modified enough that she could support it.
"I would have preferred if we started from the foundation and built up rather than started from the roof and built down," she says. "But it's getting more reasonable - that's what we're working toward." But in Arkansas and Oklahoma - despite rampant health-care price inflation, high poverty and unemployment, a shortage of doctors and hospitals in rural areas, and more than one in five residents lacking health insurance - the anti-government mood appears to be dominant:
-- Bill and Jolene Larecy of Ada, Okla., both trained as nurses, fear what he calls "a giant bureaucracy that we're going to have to feed."
-- Wyvon Griffin of Durant, Okla., would rather leave well enough alone even though the chiropractic clinic where she works can't afford insurance for her. "If it comes down to having health insurance or having a job, I want my job," she says.
-- Pat Dodge of West Memphis, Ark., a local Republican official, says only a low-cost policy to cover more serious "catastrophic" ills should be required. "We've got to get the government out of it," he says to cheers from the crowd. "Everyone's scared to death of this thing."
-- Urologist Charles Wallace, who works two days at the Lee County Cooperative Clinic in Marianna, likes the "concept" of universal coverage but says, "The money is not here to do what they're trying to do."
-- And insurance agent Don Brawley sums up the concerns of residents in both states: "We need to know what we're buying is better than what we're disposing of."
