By JIM BARON

If Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president is faltering, as primary results and polling seem to indicate, you couldn’t tell by the several hundred screaming, chanting fans who squeezed into a section of the Rhode Island College gymnasium on Sunday.

The enthusiastic audience was primed to react wildly to every Clinton applause line, particularly eating it up when she took partisan shots at President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. They also seemed to appreciate her few carefully targeted criticisms at primary opponent Barack Obama.
At one point they appropriated Obama’s campaign catchphrase “Yes, we can,” and modified it to a chant of “Yes, she can.”
The former first lady spent most of the day in Rhode Island, stumping across the state in advance of the March 4 presidential primary.
Clinton made a late afternoon stop at the El Paisa Restaurant in Central Falls for a roundtable discussion on health care, which she has made the signature issue of her presidential bid.
She started the day at a fundraiser at the home of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, where campaign staffers said she took in about $100,000, and she shook hands at Johnston’s Atwood Grill.
“There isn’t any issue more important than health care,” she told the packed room in Central Falls that was crowded mostly with the media. “Health care to me is a passion and a cause.”
About 100 supporters clutching red, white and blue campaign signs lined Dexter Street across from El Paisa in the frigid twilight temperature, in some cases for a couple of hours or more, remaining there throughout her visit just for a glimpse of the candidate entering and leaving the building.
Because of space restrictions in the tiny restaurant, the public was not allowed inside the Central Falls event.
“This little state has a big voice on March the fourth,” Clinton told the throng at RIC. “I don’t know that I have seen an election so critical to charting our course going forward as this one. The challenges are big, but so are the opportunities.”
A recent Brown University poll showed Obama narrowing what had been a comfortable lead for the New York senator in Rhode Island, which is often referred to as Clinton Country in the political world because of the smallest state’s rabid support for President Bill Clinton, who will be here on Thursday to campaign for his wife.
In Central Falls, Clinton said, “we have to limit the percentage of anyone’s income that they ever have to pay for health insurance. I think it should be limited to 6 or 7 percent. Period. I think that should be the limit.”
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” Clinton told the largely Hispanic audience, “and I sometimes worry that too many people in our country just don’t see the problems that are being inflicted on so many of our fellow Americans.
‘I want people to understand what life is like if you have a profoundly ill child,” she said, “if you don’t have insurance, if you are a doctor trying to take care of people who can’t afford to pay for their prescriptions, if you are at a health clinic, if you are a working single mom. I want people to know this is not some abstract issue. This is real in the lives of people in Rhode Island and across America.”
Clinton took Obama to task for not supporting universal health insurance.
Under his plan, she said, “children are required to have health insurance so parents have to find a way to pay for insurance for their children. But when you have done this job for as long as I have, you know that a sick parent has a terrible impact on the lives of children. And a sick parent can lose their livelihood, lose their job, so to say yes, we are going to take care of kids, but we’re not going to take care of their kids doesn’t work. That’s why we need universal health care where nobody is left out.”
“I hope here in Rhode Island, we have some Rhode Island elected officials (in attendance) I hope there is a way for the state to maintain RIte Care. George Bush has stood in our way of expanding the S-CHIP program (RIte Care is an S-CHIP program) and has vetoed our effort to put extra dollars in. But help is on the way. So maintain the program at least for another year” until a new administration takes over. 
Laurie Heltman of Providence called herself “one of the faces of RIte Care.
“I am a single mother of two,” she told Clinton at the roundtable, “the youngest has just turned 17 years-old. I have my own business and I work 70 hours per week. I provide my own job, I pay taxes and I have provided jobs for many other people over the years. I work when I am sick, I work when I am hurt and I work no matter what the conditions are. I am the breadwinner. It is all on me.”
Heltman said she can not afford health insurance for herself or her dependent child.
“It is hard to put into words what S-CHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) and RIte Care means to families like mine. It is our safety net, our saving grace, our peace of mind. RIte Care saves lives, keeps families strong and keeps families together.”
Clinton made a pitch for Rhode Island to fund its RIte Care program.”
Dr. Pablo Rodriguez told the senator that doctors “are the face of the insurance companies, we are the face of the failure of the health care system in this country in that we have to tell patients we have been seeing for many, many years that we can’t take care of you any more because you don’t have any more coverage.”
Some patients get sicker and sicker, Rodriguez said, because they split their pills rather that take the correct dosage because they don’t have enough money.
“Insurance premiums are getting absolutely out of control,” Rodriguez said, noting that a family at the median family income level, must pay one-third of what they bring in for health insurance.
 “I think it is unconstitutional to discriminate against sick people,” Clinton responded, “and in fact that is what insurance companies do every single day. Insurance companies have been given the power to determine who lives and dies.”