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Thanks to Rob Paterson at The FASTForward Blog, we learn that one of General Patraeus’s advisers, Australian David Kilcullen, has a theory about the social context of war that applies as well to any political battle including the evolving debate on health care reform. The idea is that war is about story, and the winner is the one who has the story most people adopt. Simple enough. See Kilcullen’s chart below:

So who has the best story when it comes to health care reform? Most presidential candidates seem to have adopted the same first chapters — too expensive, poor quality, bankrupted families all caused by corporate evil doers — in other words, the US health care system is broken. Then there’s the symbolic imagery of fat cat CEOs and children going without their immunizations, as well.

For myth, we can look back to the ‘good old days’ when health care was cheap, caring, honest and well, simple. (it is a myth after all!) So far so good.

But here is where the various plots diverge. Who are the protagonists, the heroes and the fashionable anti-heroes? What exactly is the ‘rest of the story’?

And for us readers, what do we do? What’s our role in the plot– the righteous mob? band of revolutionaries? irrelevant extras? Where to we come in? And what is the promised land? Or more specifically, what is the image of a future sustainable health care system that we can, first of all, understand and then get behind? And more important, what sacrifices should we be willing to make? This is a morality play after all, and not one that’s all too concerned, it seems, about the facts.

Oh, yes and we must have a satisfying ending. Good has to triumph, or there will be hell to pay. Pundit rage is not a very pretty sight.

So may the best story win. I just hope when we finish the book, we’re able to tell if it was a work of fiction or not.