Here's what conservatives are planning in their latest effort to kill health care reform:

A group called Americans for Prosperity (prosperity for its chairman and founder, oil billionaire David H. Koch, anyway) has released a new ad from its "Hands Off My Health Care" initiative. That phrase, by the way, is trademarked, lest you were thinking of using it as a name for your dog.

"Come on, Hands Off My Health Care(TM), good dog! Let's take a nice walk to the hospital and watch them kick out the uninsured deadbeats!"

The campaign will spend $750,000 on local media channels to frighten women into thinking that health care reform will lead to their deaths by breast cancer. It's a false, ridiculous charge, but false, ridiculous scare tactics often work.

The ad is based on an unfortunate, badly timed recommendation -- not an order, not a law or a policy -- that was issued last year by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Its members, by the way, were appointed by President George W. Bush, not Barack Obama.

The statement said that women aged 40 to 49 don't need mammograms every year because frequent screenings lead to false alarms and unneeded biopsies while not making a big difference in survival odds. Every other year should be enough, the statement said. (Government panels also make recommendations on diet, so we can see in the obesity epidemic how much force these statements carry.)

The task force is not a political body, but a political firestorm ensued.

Predictably, to everyone but its members, the panel's recommendation brought howls of protest from doctors, not to mention American women, who will give up their mammograms when Pittsburgh fixes its potholes, which is to say never. For years, they have been racing for the cure and pinking out everything they own on the premise that early detection is the best defense against the disease They are not going to accept overall odds -- even if the task force got them right -- as predictive of individual cases. Nor should they. Cancer patients defy the odds every day. Who wants to believe they can't be among them?

The task force got the picture, apologized for not making it clear that this was just a suggestion that women could accept or ignore in making their own decisions, and that was that.

You wouldn't know any of this from the ad that's running March 11-18 targeting Democratic members of Congress in 18 districts across the country. That includes two in Pennsylvania, where they will be aiming at Rep. Chris Carney and Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper.

The ad features breast cancer survivor Tracy Walsh of North Augusta, S.C., who was diagnosed at age 43.

"Early detection saved my life," she says. She goes on to warn that if reform passes, government panel guidelines about delaying mammograms until age 50 could become law designed to cut costs at the expense of lives. Never mind that nobody is suggesting any such thing. It sounds scary, and that's the point.

"If I had followed the new government guidelines on mammograms, my cancer would have spread undetected, and my chances of survival would have been reduced," she says. And that, she says, is what could happen "if government takes over your health care."

The ad ends with the GOP's favorite war cry: "We need to start over and get health care right." Translation: We need to delay, stall and maneuver until reform is dead and buried.

Conspicuously absent from this message is what happens to uninsured women who have breast cancer, or any other serious ailment. Apparently, they're not entitled to the same care that saved Tracy Walsh.

This is just another salvo in the ongoing battle over health care reform, and it is trying the patience of patients everywhere -- past, present and future.

All attempts at bipartisanship have failed. Republicans are so determined to make Mr. Obama a one-term president, they growl, snap and sneer at him even when he does what they've asked him to do.

Open discussion with both parties? They asked for it, they got it, they declared it "a trap."

Tort reform to lower the cost of malpractice insurance? They demanded it, they got a pilot program, they denounced it as a sop.

Strict limits on public funding of abortion? They insisted on it, they got it, they're voting against the bill anyway. Maybe if Congress threw in a life sentence for anyone who undergoes or performs the procedure, a couple of them would vote for health care reform, but I doubt it.

Last week it seemed as if the president finally, finally got it that he can expect zero cooperation from this crew no matter what he does. Rather than allow him to claim victory on a signature issue, they would rather let millions of Americans continue to suffer under the insurance industry's Kafkaesque rules, or worse, go without coverage at all. So it was an overdue relief when Mr. Obama gave a speech urging passage that was more muscular and rousing than any since he took office.

Republicans, however, couldn't succeed in killing reform without the help of conservative Democrats, who have turned their party's majority in both houses into something of a joke. If the Dems stuck together they could get this through, but too many are wedded to their districts' earmarks or their personal interests. The concept of the greater good seems to have fallen off their radar.

The members of Congress targeted by this latest phony-baloney ad need to stand up to the fear mongering. They need to keep foremost in their minds all the women like Tracy Walsh who can't get the life-saving care she got until Congress stops dithering and does its job.

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