An estimated 18,000 people crammed into a riverfront park yesterday to hear Sen. Barack Obama say he would fix an American health-care system that tends to work against those who need it most.

Obama, placing a new focus on health care amid the nation's economic turmoil, dismissed Sen. John McCain's plan as narrow, financially burdensome and more helpful to insurance companies than to the insured.

"I'm not saying [McCain] doesn't care what people are going through," Obama told an enthusiastic crowd at Victory Landing Park. "I'm saying he doesn't know."

Obama devoted more than 10 minutes of his speech to criticizing McCain's health-care plan, which would provide each family with a $5,000 tax credit and deregulate the insurance market in an effort to drive costs down through competition.

Obama said McCain's plan would take back its tax savings by taxing health-care benefits -- "an old Washington bait-and-switch."

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds called that "a bald-faced lie."

"John McCain will improve the tax code so that middle-class paychecks aren't used to pay government bureaucrats, but instead will pay for the access to health care Americans deserve," Bounds said.

A month before the Nov. 4 election, Obama used the Newport News event to kick off a new push on health care that will include four new television ads, four separate mailers targeted to swing-state voters, radio commercials and events in every battleground state, according to The Associated Press.

On Tuesday, Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, will headline a news conference at the state Capitol to talk about how McCain's health-care plan would affect Virginia.

In Newport News yesterday, Obama said his mother died of ovarian cancer in a hospital bed while fighting with an insurance company that refused to pay for her treatments, saying she had a pre-existing condition. Health-care reform, he said, "isn't political to me -- it's personal."

Obama's rally was the third appearance of his presidential campaign in Hampton Roads, where a Times-Dispatch poll last week said the candidates are running even. The region could determine which candidate wins Virginia and its 13 electoral votes. Virginia has not backed a Democrat for president since 1964.

Hundreds of people queued up before dawn for the midday event. Volunteers moved through the crowd registering new voters ahead of Monday's 5 p.m. deadline.

"I just wanted to be part of this history," said April Hill of Newport News, who brought her son and daughter. An election with a black nominee "is a beautiful thing to see in my lifetime and my kids' lifetime," said, Hill, who is black. "In a way, it doesn't even matter if he wins. History is being made here."

Obama promised to confront drug companies about unfairly high prices and insurance companies about "discriminating" against people with cancer and other catastrophic illnesses. He said his health-care plan would help small businesses pay for costly treatments.

He said he would finance his plan by modernizing an old and ineffective health-records system and by ending some of the tax cuts for wealthy people that were pushed by President Bush.

Obama said deregulating the insurance market is as bad an idea as bank deregulation, which led to the current economic crisis.

Doug Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior policy adviser, said McCain's plan to offer a tax credit in exchange for taxing employer-paid health benefits would be a net plus for all but the most wealthy Americans.

McCain has criticized Obama's plan as excessively costly and unworkable.
Contact Bill Geroux at (757) 498-2820 or bgeroux@timesdispatch.com.