The cheering this week at President Obama’s healthcare reform signing ceremony was loud, lusty and long, but the marketing of this momentous decision will be much longer and probably a lot louder.

I worked for fifteen years on healthcare reform, culminating in the struggle over the Clinton initiative in the mid-90’s, so I have some experience in mounting the PR campaigns that are necessary to sell healthcare reform and its hard-to-explain, my-eyes-glaze-over complexity to the American public. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the Obama administration has decided to mount a 7-month PR campaign to explain and promote this new reform package, all leading up to the midterm November election. Here are a few humble tips for the upcoming campaign from a veteran of the healthcare wars:

- Don’t oversell. The package that the Senate and then the House of Representatives cobbled together isn’t optimal, since it phases in over four years, doesn’t cover everyone, contains an individual mandate and has no public option. Building up unreasonable expectations and then slowly deflating them is the worst possible scenario, leading inevitably to disappointment, cynicism and more anti-government rhetoric.

- Call the insurance companies out on their premiums. America has an employer-based, private insurance system, and this reform doesn’t change that. Polls show consistently that Americans like their doctors and their hospitals, but don’t like their insurance companies – a fact the administration discovered late in the game when they changed the name of the campaign from health care reform to health insurance reform. What the resulting reform does do is place a few more restrictions on the insurance industry — but it does not incorporate any mechanism for constraining premiums. Now is the time for the administration to put the onus of responsibility for healthcare cost inflation on the health insurance industry, asking them very publicly to fully disclose their executive salaries and bonuses and their profit margins, and justify any big price increases to the already-covered.

- Stick to the facts. The President went over the benefits of the legislation this morning in his speech before signing the bill – but understandably, in that moment of triumph, didn’t list the drawbacks of the bill. His talking points over the next seven months, which Congressional leaders would do well to follow, should also point out the things the bill doesn’t do – constrain costs and premiums, cover everyone, or prevent insurance costs from rising steeply for the under-30 age group.

- And finally, don’t forget that just about every poll ever taken, including the many decades the Gallup Organization has asked the question, have shown that more than ninety percent of Americans consistently believe that healthcare is a right and not a privilege. We don’t agree on anything like we agree on that. In the whole “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” equation, life always comes first. If the administration bases its campaign on that one incontrovertible unifying factor, it will have a good shot at convincing the skeptics that this reform is in their interest.

David Langness can be reached at dlangness@mww.com.

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