Ariana Huffington recently anointed diet-and-exercise guru Dean Ornish as her chief medical correspondent. With all the guff her site had taken from the science-based medicine crowd for giving free rein to anti-vaccinists, faith healers and the no-evidence-needed alternative medicine freaks, I thought it was a smart move -- a tack toward the responsible center, if you will.

But in yesterday's post, Ornish recounted his 14-year-battle to get Medicare to pay for a pilot project to test lifestyle intervention as a cure for heart disease (which wouldn't save Medicare money, but would save more lives for the same money expended as, say, giving those people cholesterol-lowering medication). What he drew from his saga was that the government can't be trusted to run health care, and that health care reformers needed to rise above the right-left divide and unite around reimbursing physicians for keeping people well.

It was a classic case of crunchy granola versus the class warriors. The comments section was overwhelmed with hostile attacks on Ornish's above-the-fray moralizing. The commentators defended single-payer, pointed out the indiscriminate nature of many diseases, articulated the special needs of the poor whose stress and multiple jobs make them especially prone to disease, etc. etc. What was striking was how thoughtful and well-reasoned many of the comments were, a far cry from conspiracy-minded rants of that usually dominate the comments space.

I spent much of last year trying to shoehorn the Ornish philosophy into the health care debate. I agree we need to pay for cost-effective prevention options -- including the Ornish approach to lifestyle intervention for people seriously at risk of heart disease.

But it's a tough fit because that's not going to end disease in America. And as long as people continue to get sick, they will face the problem of an inadequate insurance system and an out-of-control medical system. As one intelligent commentator pointed out, every one of us is eventually going to get sick, face a traumatic injury or an unexplained illness. Every one is going to die, and many will face agonizing end-of-life medical choices -- no matter how healthful their lifestyles.

When any of that happens, they deserve a well-functioning and reasonably priced sick care system. The last thing a sick person needs is a lecture on how they ate wrong and failed to get enough exercise in the months and years leading up to the acute event.