It’s funny, you know?

I’m running for Chester County Clerk of Courts and it seems like every other question I get from a prospective voter is about health care or abortion, which strikes me as a bit odd.

I’m all ready to talk about what I’d like to do with the office, improve processes and find ways to make it run more cheaply and efficiently and then I find myself caught in the middle of this debate. Thankfully, the abortion discussions are very short — and if people are making their county row office decisions based on that issue, there’s not a lot I can say or do to change their minds.

But the health care thing is a lot stickier. Already, it’s personal, as my wife is a dentist and lives on the front lines of the current health care crisis. It got more personal this past week when one of her older relatives started spouting some of the propaganda talking points of the anti-reform group and when he started talking about swastikas, I knew it was going to get ugly, quick. And it did.

I won’t go into details, here, other than to say said relative isn’t really a bad guy, but bases his thinking on a lot of the bad information being put out there. I’m being generous in calling it bad information — what we’re seeing are outright lies.

Whether we start with Sarah Palin’s “Death Panels”  — by the way, the end of life counseling that Palin is distorting was introduced by a GOP member of Congress — or the laughable complaints about the deficit (where, exactly, were all the worries about this deficit when we spent trillions on the Iraq war and cut taxes at the same time?), make no mistake, this is a calculated campaign to stop anything like meaningful reform of health care.

And it’s nothing new. Sure, the Clinton attempt at reform in 1993-94 was heavy-handed and poorly executed, but in the end it was killed by the “incite to riot” politics that seem to be used so well these days. I’ve seen it here in Pocopson Township, too.

When the supervisors here attempted to revise the township’s lousy zoning ordinance with something that might offer a small amount of control of overdevelopment, local developers illegally stuffed flyers into every mailbox in the township containing outright lies about the ordinance and a couple hundred people showed up and the ordinance was dead, right there and right then. I was the only one who spoke up, publicly for the ordinance — the supervisors were too cowed to stand up for their own legislation — but it was a little like Kevin Bacon’s character in Animal House yelling “remain calm, all is well.”

So, who is behind this blatant campaign of misinformation? Drug companies? Nope. Doctors? Nope. Hospitals? Nope. All would benefit from the reforms being discussed. No, just one party and one party only looks to be hurt from reform: the insurance industry.

And like the Wall Street bailout — with millionaire CEO’s expecting you to foot the bill for their explosive profits, mind-boggling salaries and nauseating bonuses — they’ll say or do anything to get your money and make you think, somehow, it’s a good idea.

But of course, it’s not a good idea and it costs you a ton of money, both in terms of your insurance premiums and your taxes.

Wait, it costs you money? Yup. Let me explain. There are roughly 47 million people without health insurance. What happens when they are sick or seriously injured? Hospitals treat them and you foot the cost in higher bills, and higher premiums. That also means higher premiums for government workers and people on Medicare and Medicaid. One estimate I saw suggested that if we had universal health care, Chester County’s government would save more than $8 million dollars. That’s just one county. Imagine what the state could save, not to mention the federal government.

So how else does it cost you money? Health insurance companies routinely run their operation at a minimum of 30 percent overhead (and often a lot more), which means at least 30 cents of your premium dollars don’t go for medical care, but rather to pay CEOs and to plaster Dick Vermeil on any surface that doesn’t move. Medicare/Medicaid? The overhead is a mere 6 percent. And let’s not forget the additional expenses that health care providers have in dealing with the private insurance companies — even small offices need now to have a dedicated person just to deal with paperwork and bureaucracy and to make sure the insurance companies actually pay claims and minimize rationing of health care — already much worse in the U.S. for most of us than it is in Canada or the U.K. I speak on this from personal experience — it took three months to get approved for an MRI for my bad shoulder not long ago.

Contrary to the talking points being put out there, government is proving each and every day to be more efficient than the private sector. Is it perfect? No, of course not. In fact, in Pennsylvania, because of the way the state administers the program, Medicaid is lousy — the doctors are so poorly paid that very few are willing to participate — and again, the hospitals are forced to pick up the financial slack. That’s one area where a stronger federally centralized program — bringing it on par with Medicare — would probably be a good idea.

If we do nothing — which is what the insurance companies want — we’ll keep paying more and getting less, and more and more of our government spending will be eaten up by health care costs.

It’s not rocket science — but it’s time for people to cut through to distortions and lies and see what the real truth here is. Worried about the deficit? Support reform, because it will cut government costs over the long run, despite what you may have heard.