The recent fervor sparked by Rep. Alan Grayson’s comments about the Republican health care plan have created quite the buzz in our 24-hour news cycle. Replay after replay of Grayson’s comments have turned the phrase “die quickly” and “holocaust in America” into a rallying cry for the GOP. But wait a second; the whole “the other side wants to kill Americans” concept seems to have come up before in the health care debate.

Maybe it was a couple months ago when Republican Ginny Brown-Waite suggested Democrats wanted senior citizens to “drop dead”? Or maybe it was when Sarah Palin said that President Obama wanted to put her child with Down Syndrome in front of a “death panel”? Nah, there’s no way the Grand Old Party would spend months building up the myth of Democrats pulling the plug on Grandma only to turn around and ask Rep. Grayson to apologize for his over-the-top comments. The GOP wouldn’t dream of calling another person “not capable of shame” and reaching “a new low” after all the lies and misinformation they’ve spread … Mr. Pot, I think you should take a good long look in the mirror.

Now, this isn’t to say that I condone Mr. Grayson’s comments. I don’t actually think that Republicans want to kill other Americans. The main thrust of his comments were that leaving the status quo as it is would continue what a recently released Harvard study found were startling statistics. Every year 45,000 people die in the U.S. due to lack of health coverage. A person dies due to lack of health insurance every 12 minutes, up from once every 30 minutes. In order to fix that, and hopefully lower the ballooning costs of health care, we asked our government to come up with some possible reforms to the current system.

In order for these reforms to happen, every institution needs to be doing what it should to promulgate the facts of health care reform, not the fiction. This means news organizations (I’m looking at you Fox News) need to quell the ratings urge to broadcast each and every loud wacko that shows up at a town hall meeting or a rally carrying a picture of Obama with a Hitler-stache. Instead, news organizations should be telling Americans what are in each of the proposed bills and how it would change the current system.

Our politicians need to stay focused on health care reform and avoid the back-and-forth partisan bickering that has been increasingly turning off Americans from this debate. Less Joe “You Lie!” Wilson, less Alan “Holocaust in America” Grayson and less coverage of fringe groups like “the birthers”. Americans want substantive debate about this critically important issue. Substantive debate may not reward a politician with a great sound bite in the media, but it will earn that politician the faith and trust of an American people seeking change.