page_title: Lyndon LaRouche
section_title: 2009: U.S. health care reform
hierarchical_section_title: Lyndon LaRouche / Career / 2000s / 2009: U.S. health care reform
caption_attribution_description: English: Members of the LaRouche movement with a display, showing Barack Obama with a "Hitler mustache".
context_page_description: Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was an American political activist, convicted fraudster, cult leader, and founder of the LaRouche movement, whose main organization was the National Caucus of Labor Committees.
  Born in Rochester, New Hampshire, LaRouche became sympathetic to socialist and Marxist movements and ideals in his twenties during World War Two and by the 1960s became engaged in increasingly smaller and more radical splinter groups. During the 1970s he created the foundation of the LaRouche Movement and became more engaged in conspiratorial beliefs and violent and/or illegal activities. In 1986, his movement reached its height in electoral success when Larouchite candidates won several Democratic primaries for state offices in Illinois. Later in the 1980s, criminal investigations led to convictions of several LaRouche movement members, including LaRouche himself. He was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment, but only served five years.
  LaRouche was a perennial candidate for President of the United States. He ran in every election from 1976 to 2004 as a candidate of third parties established by members of his movement.
context_section_description: During the discussion of U.S. health care reform in 2009, LaRouche advocated a single-payer health care bill and took exception to what he described as Barack Obama's proposal that "independent boards of doctors and health care experts [should] make the life-and-death decisions of what care to provide, and what not, based on cost-effectiveness criteria." LaRouche said the proposed boards, later compared to "death panels" by Sarah Palin, would amount to the same thing as the Nazis' Action T4 euthanasia program, and urged Americans to "quickly and suddenly change the behavior of this president ... for no lesser reason than that your sister might not end up in somebody's gas oven."
  Images at tables of volunteers compared Obama to Hitler, and at least one had a picture of Obama with a Hitler-style mustache. In Seattle, police were called twice in response to people threatening to attack the volunteers. During one widely reported public meeting, Congressman Barney Frank referred to the images as "vile, contemptible nonsense."
caption: LaRouche poster of Barack Obama with a 'Hitler mustache'
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