Health bloggers were so busy linking to David Leonhardt's excellent New York Times Magazine piece on the lessons about cost and quality drawn from Intermountain Healthcare that we nearly overlooked another piece in the magazine -- a profile of conservative activist Dick Armey -- that tells another, more alarming, story about the politics and ideology of health reform.

Armey and FreedomWorks had a hand in the angry and chaotic town hall meetings of last summer. (Freedomworks isn't the same as the Tea Party, but they overlap.) And health care, for Armey, isn't just about health or care.  It's a vehicle for the rise of the right. The economic conservative far right. The right that wants to stop government in its tracks. Or shrink it. The right that believes the American way is all about the rights of individuals, not the needs of community. And of course, the "rights" of individuals have to do with things like the flat tax, not health coverage. The right to health care, however, doesn't seem to figure in here too much.

(Here's an essay I did recently for the Hastings Center on how health policy becomes a proxy for politics. Len Nichols wrote on values and health care here. For Len's discussion of why Thomas Jefferson, whom Len in his inimitable way labeled an "evidence-based" kind of guy, would regard health coverage as an American value, listen to him and Hastings president Tom Murray talk about health care and values on NPR's "Science Friday" here.)

Michael Sokolove, the author of the NYT piece, reported that back in 1994, during the Clinton health care debate, Armey told The Washington Post: "Health care happens to be the play they called. They're the offense. We're the defense." For Armey, the defense means advancing the cause of small government by stopping new Washington initiatives in their tracks.

Sokolove writes:

What makes Armey an effective advocate is how he uses his status as a learned professor and a plain-spoken man to deliver the message his audiences want to believe: that various Democratic initiatives are not just wrongheaded policy but also flagrant violations of the Constitution and affronts to traditional American values. In his telling, the Constitution is elevated to something like a sacred religious text, written by Christian believers, possibly divinely inspired and intended to be read in the most literal way. It contains solutions to any civic problem faced by modern Americans, including those brought about by the tangled health care system...

Armey prides himself on his intellect and rationality, but his years in Washington have taught him the political uses of irrationality and even outright fantasy. He told me he does not believe some of the most extreme charges that emerged in the debate over health care reform -- for example, that "death panels" will tell elderly people when it's time to die -- but he welcomes the energy and passion that such beliefs bring to his side. "You know that expression: The enemy of my enemy is my friend?" he asked. "Are their fears exaggerated? Yeah, probably. But are Obama's promises exaggerated? I may think it's silly, but if people want to believe that," he said, referring to death panels, "it's O.K. with me."

Armey minimizes both the depth of our nation's health care problems and the ease of fixing them. In his view, tort reform -- limiting malpractice awards even to those patients who suffer true and grievous injury -- would solve much of the problem by reducing overtreatment. Apparently his economics training excluded understanding the role of payment incentives on how our health system works. He also argues that if he went to the doctor -- which apparently he doesn't -- he would get MRIs without asking for them because he is a big shot and doctors are afraid of being sued by big shots.

In keeping with his conservative and libertarian spirit, Armey thinks all the plans for health reform cost too much and are too intrusive because they have mandates. If there's a health care crisis in America, he views it as a minor one that can be addressed with free-market remedies like allowing people to buy insurance across state lines. (As we've told you several times, this form of deregulation is not going to solve our problems.) Armey professes compassion for people who truly go without essential health care, and agrees that we need to help them. But he solves the bulk of that problem by saying that most of the 47 million uninsured and 25 million underinsured just don't exist, or they don't realize that they already have more insurance than they need.

"We are a wealthy nation, and there is not much reason that I can justify for anybody who lives within our borders doing without essential health care, and I'm happy to tell you that very few people do," he said. "If there's 15 percent who are in that category, then let's construct a 15 percent solution so they can have it. To me, that's a wonderfully generous act."

What about the millions of Americans, I asked, who have insurance but find that the rising premiums and deductibles are eating away at any financial gains they might otherwise make? "The largest empirical problem we have in health care today is too many people are too overinsured," he said.

He also somehow managed to both declare victory -- a technical knockout against the Democrats -- while admitting that he thinks they will pass a bill, albeit not quite as big a bill as they originally hoped. (He thinks they will try to work more on our health system in the future. Fine with us.)

If Armey's views seem disconnected from how many Americans experience health care, one reason could be that Armey himself has very little recent personal exposure to the system. Like many American men, he avoids doctors and said he has not seen one in many years. "I've been very fortunate, very healthy," he said, "so why change up what I've been doing?" He equates medical care with unpleasantness. "What happens to old folks, and I'm 69, is they get prodded and poked and picked on. They run a camera up your behind. If these things are medically necessary, I will adhere to them. But don't make me go through them for your comfort. Medicine is supposed to be for my safety, not yours."

Of course Armey doesn't even seem to be willing to credit Democrats for seeing any value in health care itself. It's not about uninsured kids. It's not about people who can't pay for their chemo. It's not even about getting rid of antiquated and wasteful ways of treating the elderly in Medicare. It's all about power, he argues, economic and political. "The first and most pernicious goal of this whole health care push by the Democrats is their desire to control a major sector of the American economy," he said. "Pure and simple, it's power."