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Obama's health care drive hits Va.

Forum's questions, some via Net, come largely filtered

ANNANDALE, Va. — President Obama warned Wednesday that the U.S. economy will "just sputter along" if the drive to overhaul the health care system fails this year, but he dodged a question about whether he would support taxing employer health benefits to help pay for it.

At a town-hall-style meeting in suburban Washington, Obama embraced a woman who said she was unemployed, uninsured and unable to get treatment for a recurrence of kidney cancer. "You are Exhibit A" of why changes are needed, he told Debby Smith, 53, of Appalachia, Va., as she fought back tears.

The White House had solicited questions beforehand on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter — an effort to continue tapping the new technologies that boosted Obama's presidential campaign last year. He responded to three video queries submitted to YouTube and one tweet on Twitter. The forum was live-streamed on the White House website.

Even so, the event at Northern Virginia Community College lacked the energetic free-for-all quality of the town-hall-style sessions Obama held during the campaign. The questions posed from social media networks were selected by White House staffers, and the three people he called on from the audience all were affiliated with advocacy groups that support Obama.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs defended the event beforehand, saying the questions posed reflected "a representative sample of the issues."

Smith said the White House invited her to attend after she had spoken at events for Organizing for America, an Obama grass-roots operation at the Democratic National Committee. Another questioner said he worked for Health Care for America Now, and the third identified herself as a member of the Service Employees International Union.

The questioner on Twitter asked the president whether he would support proposals to tax health care benefits provided by employers, an idea blasted during the 2008 campaign. Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., has suggested capping the amount of premiums that are tax-deductible to help finance the overhaul, estimated to cost $1 trillion or more.

"This is something that's going to be debated in the House and the Senate," Obama replied. "We're all going to have to weigh in on it." He didn't signal whether he would be willing to support curbing the tax break now.

On a GOP blog, two Republican National Committee staffers wrote a running commentary disputing the president's words. "Obama says our economy is in crisis because of health care costs," Matt Moon blogged, "but his government-run plan will make it even worse, putting our country further into debt."