The term “health care reform,” on its face, doesn’t seem like a particularly sexy political issue. It lacks the high-octane thrust behind “war on terror” and fails to pluck the biblical chords of “no child left behind.” And yet it was over health care reform that, last week, a pro-reform demonstrator got into a scuffle with a 65-year-old anti-reform protester and subsequently bit off the man’s finger.

Passions are running high. Public consensus is a pipe dream. According to a recent Gallup Poll, Americans are no closer to agreeing on health care policy than they were at the beginning of August, when Congress’ recess began. In fact, they seem to be slightly more polarized than before: at the beginning of August, 29 percent of respondents said they had no opinion on reform. At the beginning of September, that number had dropped to 24 percent.

Gallup goes on to parse the data in a variety of fascinating ways: Overall, men oppose reform by 15 percentage points, while women endorse it by nine points. Students who had been to college oppose it, but–in an odd alliance–people with post-graduate degrees and those who had not finished high school say aye to the health care bill. The higher the respondents’ income bracket, the less likely they would vote for changing the system.

Clearly, last month’s overheated exchanges, from “death panel” paranoia to town-hall shouting matches, took its toll on both bipartisanship and public apathy. And all of the baseless accusations meant that though President Obama fielded these questions with skill, he inevitably ended up playing defense at the town hall meetings he held during the last few weeks.

The political fireworks ensured that, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, the media was more focused on the conflict rather than the issues at hand:

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, for example, found that so far this year 55 percent of coverage of health care has been about the political battles, 16 percent about the protests, and only 8 percent about substantive issues like how the system works now, what will happen if it remains unchanged, and what proposed changes will mean for ordinary people.

The irony doesn’t escape me–this post clearly falls into the other 92 percent–but it’s worth pointing out how embarrassing that figure is. There are efforts out there to increase awareness of the issues at hand; Columbia is among them, along with the recently launched Health Care Stop Watch and, tangentially, Truth-o-Meter, which rates assertions made by public officials on a scale from “true” to “pants on fire.” Health Care for US is just getting off the ground–it’s trying to crowd source explanations of each segment of the health care bill.

When Obama finally draws “lines in the sand” Wednesday defining his expectations for health care policy, we’ll all have more tangible points to discuss.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about that anti-reform protester, prematurely separated from his finger: The 65-year-old retrieved his digit and took it straight to a hospital. He had Medicare. They sewed it right back on and released him the same night. Perhaps his experience with effective, efficient, affordable, government-run health care will make other anti-reformists pause for thought.