Regina speaks and draws eloquently about the movement: The growing number of us who are taking charge of our health, our family’s health, our community’s health, and ultimately our country’s health. At the Health 2.0 conference, I met an engineer who also is an MD, an MD who is a geek, a geek who is a healer, and a healer who is a patient.

Alexandra Drane proclaimed: “We signed up to help people be healthy,” which I found remarkable coming from the founder of Eliza, which I thought of only as a robo-call company but now appreciate as a company committed to using technology to promote healthy behavior.

Michel Nadeau confided that his years as a telecomm engineer were nowhere near as fulfilling his new gig as head of a startup that makes an obesity app. “A teenager sent me an email. She was writing at midnight on a Sunday, asking for help because she couldn’t bear to go to school the next morning and face the teasing because of her weight. How can that not affect you? I know what we’re doing has real impact on people.”

Ob/gyn Jeff Livingston is motivating teen girls to take care of themselves by engaging them on FaceBook. Chris Cartter is trying to make health challenges go viral through his Change Reaction program. Physician Richard Wexler was talking to video game designers for insights on patient/doctor communication.

A few days later I was with my brethren at Kaiser Permanente for our annual gathering of communicators and marketers. We saw research that shows the marketplace is ripe for a health movement. Americans know that the health care system is broken, and they don’t trust the industry or the government to fix it. They know that ultimately the solution starts with them.

They just need a nudge.

Vidal was explaining why we don’t understand the animosity that people in the Mideast have for the U.S., even though our country has propped up dictators there (Sadam Hussein, Shah of Iran, Saudi Arabian princes) and funded warlords and guerrillas, including Osama bin Laden. In the film, when people were asked why we are fighting in Iraq, you got either a reflexive “for freedom” or a lot of stammering with an occasional “for the oil.”

There’s a lot of amnesia going on in the health care reform debate. Sen. Lamar Alexander says it’s just too darn hard to tackle the problems of an industry that accounts for 17 percent of our GDP. The last time Congress gave up when the going got tough, 1992, health care accounted for 13 percent of GDP. If we could cure Congress of amnesia, they might see that giving up only lets the problem get bigger.

And there is much hand-wringing over the nearly $940 billion, 10-year cost of the current proposal. Over the last ten years, health care spending has increased $1.1 trillion. You don’t even need an amnesia cure to know that $940 billion is an improvement over $1.1 trillion.

Opponents of current reform measures call it a government takeover. If they weren’t victims of amnesia, they would see that the current health care system is headed for a government takeover. Government share of health care spending has gone from 44 percent to 47 percent over the last 10 years, on pace to becoming a majority shareholder by the end of the next decade.

The main point: Fear, facts and force are the favored approach for those who want to facilitate change, but they never work. Doctors know that even the threat of death is not enough to influence eight out of nine heart attack patients to change their lifestyles. Instead, successful change agents rely on a mixture of:

• Relate – Establish a new, emotional connection with a person or community that fosters hope.
• Repeat – Use this new relationship to learn and practice the new skills and behaviors you need to sustain change.
• Reframe – Allow this new relationship to help you see your situation and the world in a new light.

Good doctors have the first one down. To reframe, they need to help patients see the benefits of healthy changes today – healthy food can be delicious, exercise can give them more energy, meditation can reduce their stress symptoms. And they need to help them savor short-term wins so that they will repeat the behavior over and over until it becomes their new habit.

Best part about this book: The writing. Deutschman is a magazine writer (Fortune, GQ, Fast Company) and book author (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) who has a raft of stories at his disposal. He never tells, he shows. He has spent quality time with the change leaders he profiles — so much so that you find out, for example, that 35 years into her successful program to rehabilitate criminals at San Francisco’s Delancy Street, Mimi Silbert still has days when she doesn’t have that fire in the belly. Her solution: act “as if” she does, and eventually the fire comes back.

Favorite quote:

I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’ — Mimi Silbert

Bits that stuck:

• Quick wins reward the hard work of change, nourish the faith and keep critics at bay.
• When stuck with a problem I haven’t been able to solve myself, the first step is to seek out a new relationship with someone or some group that has had success in this area.
• When the spirit flags, “fake it until you make it.” Act “as if” you have the spirit and it will come to you.

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I’m trying to be patient. But WTF: first we line up behind Russia and China in favor landmines, and now we’ll be escalating war?

Sid Garfield’s plan for health care reform was so far ahead of its time that the organization he founded — Kaiser Permanente — still drives toward the vision, years after his death. (Disclosure: I am senior director of communications and brand management for Kaiser Permanente’s Colorado region).

This biography puts today’s health care discussion into historical context. As early as the 1930s, reform proposals that threatened the status quo were called “socialized medicine.” Garfield and uber-capitalist Henry Kaiser were “socialists” because they came up with a financing system that brought quality health care to working Americans. Workers and their employers “pre-paid” a few cents a day for full coverage. Garfield and his doctors and nurses were thus assured of a predictable revenue stream that enabled them to open clinics and hospitals close to work sites, such as the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, the California Aqueduct in the Mojavi Desert and the WW II shipyards in Oakland.

The financing mechanism also encouraged Garfield’s team to reduce injuries and prevent illness. Workplace safety and the country’s earliest screening and vaccination programs blossomed under the arrangement. The smoking cessation, stress reduction and nutrition classes offered by Kaiser Permanente today have their roots in this core emphasis on what Garfield called “Total Health.”

Garfield’s approach brought doctors of all specialties together under one roof.  This “group practice” model is the environment in which doctors train, and it only made sense to continue it in day-to-day practice. Today, 60 percent of J.D. Power’s top 20 health care systems are group practice models, such as Kaiser Permanente, Mayo and Harvard Pilgrim.

I was surprised to learn that Garfield created hospital designs. His put the medical team closer to patients and segregated sterile hallways from public ones. He installed pneumatic tubes so that “medical records will get to the doctor before the patient does.”

Garfield championed computer-assisted medicine in the 1960s, recognizing that information is the currency of health care. With medical information collected and analyzed, doctors get granular about each patient’s needs and they get the big picture about diseases and effectiveness of treatments.

Garfield’s vision still unfolds today, as Kaiser Permanente recently completed an electronic medical records system that serves more than 8 million patients. But implementation of an EMR is only the first step toward Garfield’s vision of a coordinated system of health care rather than sick care. In the next steps, patients use the online access to their records to become more engaged in their health care, physicians and their teams use the information to tailor care precisely to the patient need, and researchers compare the effectiveness of treatment protocols.

Ironically, Garfield, who believed his health care model would “keep medicine out of the hands of government bureaucrats,” was called a socialist. President Obama, who has said the Kaiser Permanente model is one the nation should emulate, also is called a socialist. Perhaps we need to change the definition of socialist to: One who threatens the status quo.

Favorite Garfield quotes:

National health insurance, an attractive idea to many Americans, can only make things worse. Medicare and Medicaid — equivalents of national health insurance for segments of our population — have largely failed because the surge of demand they created only dramatized and exacerbated the inadequacies of the existing delivery system and its painful shortages of manpower and facilities.

It’s really time for us to revitalize our plan. I suggest a radical new idea — that we stop building hospitals and clinics for sick people. Let’s concentrate on a brand new type of facility — a new first in the world. Let us conceive a building for health — designed, streamlined, and geared to serve our healthy members.

This change from episodic crisis sick care to programmed total health care forces a new look at the recording and processing of medical information … Continuing total health care requires a continuing life record for each individual … The content of that life record, now made possible by computer information technology, will chart the course to be taken by each individual for optimal health.”

The stories are more compelling: We all know someone whose breast cancer was caught early. That one life is real to us. The hundreds of false-positives are not. Even if we know an individual who got a clean bill of health after a suspicious mammogram, we don’t question her decision to get a mammogram in the first place.

The stories have and will prevail over the facts, and that is an important lesson for any of us who ever want to change someone’s mind. You want to improve service at work? Get your kid to drive safely? Pass a health care reform bill? Find yourself stories that resonate with the people you want to convince.

I had to tell him that this is not an issue settled by facts and logic. Yes, facts are important, but in the end people will make up their minds based on how they feel.

How do you impact emotions? Story, of course.

That is why I believe the Foundation for Biomedical Research is on the right track with a new advertising campaign. In the TV spots, you hear about animal research from the people whose lives depend on it: Jen, a scientist and breast cancer survivor, and Gail, whose husband’s life was extended by 13 years so he could raise his children before succumbing to colon cancer.

Weekly, PETA issues e-mails that are centered on a story. They urge action — usually a form e-mail to a list of scientists and bureaucrats, and sometimes a plea for financial contribution to their cause. In recent years, surveys have shown dwindling public support for using animals in research. I think the PETA stories have had an impact.

So does the Foundation for Biomedical Research. Their new ad campaign is fighting story with story, putting the argument for animal research in emotional terms. I think a moral issue properly resides in the realm of emotion, feeling and subjective judgment. But if you also need or want facts, you’ll find them at the Foundation for Biomedical Research site.