MONROE - Conservatives flocked to Belk-Tonawanda Park to rally against government-controlled health care.

Americans For Prosperity, a conservative activist group, made Monroe stop No. 32 of its Patients First “Hands Off My Health Care” tour across North Carolina. The group made two other stops in U.S. Rep. Larry Kissell’s, D-N.C., district, a district it wanted to focus on.

“Our country is at a serious crossroads,” said Dallas Woodhouse who led the rally. “We can achieve positive health reform, but it needs to be through free market solutions.”

Several local Republican leaders attended the rally to show their support of defeating government intervention.

Union County resident Bobbie Slusher, who is covered by Medicare, said she has a basic distrust of President Barack Obama. “He tells you what he thinks you want to hear,” she said.

Slusher admitted she did not have all the answers herself, but knew that more government was not the solution. “It will be the death nell for small businesses.”

Policy analyst Jon Sanders looked at health care from a financial standpoint. He said the national deficit was already ugly and said if a government-run health-care system was added, it would become “Rosie O’Donnell ugly.”

Sanders suggested some ways to reform health care, like allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, all of which were free-market oriented.

According to a release, Patients First has spent $1.9 million on TV ads in opposition to a government takeover of health care and has more than 210,000 signatures to to a “Hands Off My Health Care” petition to Congress.