The administration has taken the health care summit show on the road. After last week's White House summit, the first of five regional summits was held in Michigan this week. They brought together government officials, business owners, health care workers, and uninsured people with dreadful diseases.

One of the themes that emerged in the accounts we read (the Detroit Free Press, AP and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) was that participants really got the link between our troubled economy and our troubled health care system. It will be interesting to see if that comes through as strongly in other parts of the country, not as hard-hit as Michigan and its limping auto industry.

But as Guy Boulton of the Milwaukee paper noted:

Few of the speakers mentioned the tradeoffs, compromises and hard choices that substantial health care reform is expected to entail. And the forum didn't touch on such contentious issues as requiring people to buy health insurance or the administration's proposal to create a new government health plan for people who don't get health benefits from an employer and for small businesses.

Health reform does involve tradeoffs. And we'll need to start talking about them, and educating the public, and educating ourselves about what the public will or won't accept, will or won't understand. Because, as some polling data we blogged about earlier from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed, tradeoffs aren't always so popular. And if they aren't understood well, tradeoffs can easily become scare tactics in the hands of those who don't want reform. So these summits are great ways to start building support and enthusiasm. But they are also a reminder that we still have a long way to go.