"You better believe older, sicker people are going to be last on that list. ... Do you want someone making those decisions for you?" Fleming asked.

Fleming spent more than an hour talking to several dozen senior citizens at the nursing home in southern Shreveport about Obama's proposal to reform the country's health care system, including a publicly funded plan that in some cases could require a government board of physicians prioritizing which patients on the public plan will get their procedures first. The United Kingdom already has such boards, Fleming said.

That proposal has led to some opponents, such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican, to call the boards "death panels," implying that in some cases government doctors may decide a patient is simply too old or too sick to waste public money on.

Fleming said that characterization was too extreme, but the image had apparently stuck in the minds of most of the senior citizens in attendance.

"They're going to give us a death sentence," Nena Hardison, 89, said of Obama's proposal.

Currently, Congress is in recess, and Fleming said he did not expect Democrats to have a bill ready for passage until at least the beginning of next year, if ever.

Besides concerns about the "death panels," Fleming said he thought Obama's proposal wasn't financially "prudent." Fleming said the new program could cost trillions of dollars to fund, money Fleming questioned the government should be spending while the nation is still in a recession.

"I don't want to say he (Obama) is dishonest," Fleming said. "I think he's in denial. ... I think his understanding of economics is very poor."

As for an alternative to Obama's proposal, Fleming said his data indicated that nearly 10 million to 13 million of the nearly 50 million uninsured Americans were illegal immigrants, and that another 5 million to 10 million people were eligible for Medicare and Medicaid and simply never signed up.

Virtually all of the people in the audience said they agreed with Fleming. Martha Strother, 86, shook her head after the meeting when asked what she disliked about the government's proposal.

"Which government," Strother asked. "Ours or theirs? I want ours back, but I'm afraid they're not going to give it back."