harles D. Baker is a tall man, but it was hard to tell yesterday as he kept sinking lower into the hot seat.
The president of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care had just delivered a lecture on the virtues of the nation's employer-based health care system when a panel of health care specialists and the host of a National Public Radio talk show based in Boston ripped into his slick PowerPoint presentation.
The first photographic slide of Baker's address to the Massachusetts Medical Society's forum on universal health care set out the theme: ''Most people like their current situation.''
And in closing, Baker paraphrased Winston Churchill, admitting that the current system, like democracy, is lousy - until you compare it to all the other potential health care systems.
''Charlie, you're wrong, wrong, wrong,'' said Christopher Lydon, host of NPR's ''The Connection.''
He said he wondered why people do not complain about public fire departments but cry communism when someone calls for a public health-care system: ''The fire department puts out all fires; they don't ask for insurance before they unfurl the hoses,'' he said.
Stuart Butler, who studies domestic and economic policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, criticized health maintenance organizations, asking, ''When was the last time they called an employer to tell them how to add services? But the employers always get calls on how they can save money.''
While agreeing with Baker's incremental approach to reform, John McDonough, a former state legislator and associate professor at Brandeis University, argued that the government must not be diverted from insuring the uninsured. ''We're making this much more complicated than it needs to be,'' he said.
The conference comes shortly before Massachusetts voters will decide whether to approve ballot Question 5, which would mandate universal health insurance coverage and enforce strict controls on HMOs.
Other speakers were either criticized or praised for heralding health-care alternatives such as a single-payer system, medical savings accounts, and an individual-based system.
Further contradicting Baker, whose company has given $500,000 to the campaign to quash the ballot question, was David Himmelstein. The chief of social and community medicine at Cambridge Hospital called for the country to implement a government-controlled health-care system similar to the one in Canada.
With a slew of slides, Himmelstein rebutted Governor Paul Cellucci's claim that the number of the state's uninsured residents has fallen. He said the United States trails much of the industrialized world in everything from life expectancy to infant mortality rates, and he criticized the rising amount of money the system devotes to administrative costs.
In an attack on Baker and in support of measures like Question 5, he also invoked Churchill.
''You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they have exhausted all other possibilities,'' Himmelstein quoted the late British prime minister.
