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.

A marketing professor had a set of subjects memorize a 2-digit number and another set memorize a 7-digit number. All were told to go down the hall to the next room and recite the number. Along the way, though, they are offered a choice between chocolate cake or fruit.

Amazingly, the 7-digit memorizers overwhelmingly chose cake while the 2-digits chose fruit. The theory: two parts of the prefrontal cortex — a rational and an emotional — are in a tug of war. Occupy the rational one with a job like remembering a 7-digit number and the emotional part gets a free shot at calling the shots. The theory explains why when we’re tired, at the end of the day at work, we are more prone to yield to temptation of a snack or an extra martini.

You have to hear the Radiolab creators dramatize the war of the cortexes to appreciate this excellent example of news storytelling. I also like NPR’s rewriting of audio stories so that they are appropriate for the online reader. In this case, the Web account retains the humor but executes in a completely different way.

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.”

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.