President Obama prioritized health care reform during the campaign, held a listening tour during the transition, allocated an admirable $634 billion towards reforming the health care system in his budget, hosted a White House Health Summit, and is now holding a series of regional summits all across the country.

At yesterday’s forum in Dearborn, Michigan, for instance, representatives from insurance companies, labor unions, “workers and retirees; and nursing professors, among other stakeholders in the health care overhaul debate” agreed “on the need for health care reform” and urged the president to “emphasize preventive, wellness and primary care, and to better utilize health information technology.”

Here is one account from the Detroit Free Press:

Being insured doesn’t always mean you’ll get the help you want. At 22, Adrian Campbell-Montgomery said, she learned she had cervical cancer. Seemingly covered under her family’s General Motors employee insurance, she was rushed into surgery. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan denied payment, saying the surgery was only recommended for women 26 and older. She was in graduate school, had a small child and was now $8,000 in debt. “When does it end?” she asked during the forum. “You have to stop denying people.”

Obama’s approach serves a political purpose. Public opinion polls already indicate that the public supports comprehensive health care reform. But this kind of outreach weeds out the personal stories of insurance company malfeasance and hardships of families facing rising health care costs, and ultimately provide the administration with the same kind of emotional narrative about the need for reform that the Right often finds in the waiting lines of Canada or Great Britain.

It’s political, but it’s smart. These regional summits keep the issue in the local news — long after the national media has moved on to exploring the root cause of Anna Nicole Smith’s death — familiarize the public with progressive proposals, and allow the President and Congressional Democrats to shroud themselves in the flag of public opinion once the health care debate really heats up this summer.

For more on the White House’s regional health summits, click here.

Yesterday, Sens. Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Kent Conrad (D-ND) questioned Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner about why the administration wanted invest new money into an already bloated health care care system. This morning, when Joe Scarborough asked Washington Post columnist Eugene “not an expert in health care” Robinson how President Obama’s proposed $634 billion investment would reduce health care costs, Robinson admitted that he didn’t know:

SCARBOROUGH: Where does it go? That’s my question. Retool how? I’m not being pushy. I just keep hearing “We gotta spend that money.” What do we spend it on?

ROBINSON: Well, you know. Hopefully more than computerized electronic medical records, which I don’t think should cost as much as the administration says it should cost. You know, I don’t know. I’m not an expert in health care. I’m not.

Watch it:

Robinson may not be a health care expert, but it doesn’t take a masters in health policy to push back against pundits and policymakers who argue that investing in the system won’t lower costs or improve health outcomes.

For one, half of the money in Obama’s $634 billion health care fund actually comes from re-investing money already in the health care system, just as Gregg, Conrad and Scarborough suggest. But most reform advocates also believe that to really lower health care costs and improve health quality, $634 billion is a good start, but it’s certainly not enough. One must first invest in the system to see long-term cost savings:

- Expanding Access To Contain Costs: Expanding coverage to the 45.7 million uninsured and treading their chronic conditions won’t come cheap, but it’s necessary if we want to manage chronic diseases and offer preventive services that will treat conditions before they develop into costly medical emergencies. By extending coverage to all, you can achieve efficiencies and end cost shifting.

- Investing In Preventive Measures To Contain Costs: While the United States spent $132 billion in 2002 treating Americans with diabetes, just $70 billion went to the prevention of all diseases. It can be difficult to quantify the possible savings from expanded prevention efforts, but experts estimate that just ensuring that every child receives every routine vaccination could reduce direct and indirect health care costs by up to $40 billion over time.

- Investing In Information On Effective Treatments To Contain Costs: Today, Americans are likely to receive the appropriate care just half of the time, and approximately one-third of individuals seeking care are likely to experience a medical error such as a medication mistake or the wrong lab results. Improving quality could help save lives and contain costs. Estimates of savings go as high as 150,000 lives and $100 billion every year.

- Using Health IT To Contain Costs: Fewer than 25 percent of hospitals, and fewer than 20 percent of doctor’s offices, employ health information technology systems. Estimates vary, and real-life experience is limited, but one group of researchers finds that implementing health IT would result in mean annual savings of $40 billion over a 15-year period.

Recently, PhRMA, SEIU, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AARP, Aetna, AFL-CIO, and AHIP signed a letter urging Congress to suspend pay-go rules when considering health care reform: “While the cost savings from improving the efficiency and quality of health care will be significant, many of the anticipated savings will be realized in the long term, and may thus not be evident in a ten year budget window…Requiring spending or revenue offsets for the entire cost of health reform within a ten year budget window, as required under a traditional pay-as-you-go rule, will significantly reduce the likelihood of enacting legislation to achieve essential reforms for long-term savings.”

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