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Early this month, when Rep. Dennis Richardson made a stop in Wallowa County in his newly launched campaign for Oregon governor, it was mildly comforting to learn the GOP candidates legislative career had included some time in the health care reform trenches. It seemed noteworthy because a major part of Republicans pitch for office nowadays amplifies any and all of the public grumbling that currently surrounds Obamacare, the Democratic reforms now lurching out awkwardly in such painful fits and starts.

Beyond decrying incompetency in the so-called rollout, its also fair for Obamacares critics to point out, correctly, that these reforms produce a not-insignificant number of losers people who were already buying insurance but who will now see those policies terminated, to be replaced (contingent upon policyholder agreement) with new, more expensive plans.

Granted, the Dems do calculate, probably correctly, that winners those who will realize substantial decreases in their outlays for coverage, thanks to the Affordable Care Acts income-indexed subsidies will far outnumber losers, but that doesnt alleviate the sting felt by those being hit with a price hike.

The entire topic of health care reform is of course exceedingly complex, a fact Rep. Richardson readily acknowledges. Its a complicated issue, he said during an interview in Enterprise.

We can state in simplified terms, however, the major differences between the political right and political left in basic approaches to reform. In a nutshell, the right advocates enhancing the existing systems free market attributes (which are currently weak), getting patients into a habit of weighing costs and other important factors before reaching any decisions about their care. The left meanwhile strives mainly for lower insurance prices, which it hopes will come about by forcing more young and healthy people into the insurance pool.

The left will also stay the course with an existing trend favoring managed care i.e., insurers help control costs by calling much of the tune for the dance between patient and provider. Patient voice, physician choice and other such lofty ideals will still receive some level of lip service, to be sure, but persuasive disincentives will start kicking in against communities that harbor too many out-of-step dancers.

If were lucky, the new reforms will work, and even if you thoroughly detest the concepts behind Obamacare, you should still hope for their effectiveness. According to a 2012 Kaiser Family Foundation report, the U.S. spent $2.6 trillion on health care in 2010, an average of $8,402 per person. Health care, which accounted for 7.2 percent of the nations economic activity in 1970, had risen to 17.9 percent by 2009 and 2010.

For a long time now, medical cost increases have been consistently outpacing consumer inflation as a whole, each year demanding larger chunks of household incomes. In growing numbers, Americans are losing the race to keep up. Just this past June, NerdWallet Health reported its findings that 1.7 million people would file for bankruptcy this year due to unpaid medical bills, and another 56 million, though stopping short of bankruptcy, would be struggling anyway to meet their medical expenses.

So it would be good if, instead of the half-measured Obamacare, the response we now had in place employed more potent medicine. Coming from the left, this would mean cutting out insurers and their corporate profit motive and moving to a single-payer system. From the right, it would be whatever it might take to finally attract widespread use of health savings accounts coupled with high-deductible catastrophic insurance plans.

In Oregon, Richardson authored a bill in 2009, revised and reintroduced in 2011, to establish the Oregon Base Plus health plan, a medical credit card-based system providing tax benefits to people who take the plunge to become more personally engaged and savvy in their care-related purchases. Republicans in other states have introduced similar bills.

Of course, for the consumerism idea to work well, merely passing bills in some states wont be enough. As with the current reforms, federal involvement would be called for and not just for legislation, but for inspirational leadership. The concept needs to be sold, evangelized: In addition to exciting a consumer mentality among patients, some behavior ingrained in the systems other participants would have to be turned around. For starters, providers should be forced to reacquaint themselves with both the skill and will to answer the patients question, Whats this choice going to cost me?

Ideally the president would lead the cause. Unfortunately, the most recent Republican administration was taken more with affairs foreign than domestic, and by now medical costs have spiraled so much further beyond what people can bear, we may have already lost our best opportunity for trying this more person-friendly, less insurer-centric fix.