DAVIDSON, N.C. — Eight months after starting his second term in 2005, President George W. Bush's ambition to partially privatize Social Security was DRT (dead right there).

In the 10th month of his first term in 1993, President Bill Clinton's health-care reform bill was introduced in Congress, landing practically DOA (dead on arrival). Within nine months it would officially be declared deceased by congressional leaders.

By that dreadful awful measure of recent presidents and their grand reformist plans, President Barack Obama's vision for reforming health care is in better shape. Call it SGP (still gotta pulse). Several bills are working their way through Congress. At press time, the U.S. House was hoping to vote over the weekend on its version.

The consensus at a health-care symposium sponsored by Davidson College on Thursday was that something that can reasonably pass for health-care reform will become law.

Thursday evening's crowd of 60 or so souls, gathered 20 miles up the highway from Charlotte, N.C., heard three academics discuss health care and the need, costs and ethics of improving the U.S. system. In voices fitting for this academic scene, the panelists described the rising costs of health care, the politics of the debate and the social costs of doing nothing.

The scene was different — and decidedly louder — in Washington the same day, according to eyewitness accounts; the latest tea-party animals gathered once more to raise their pitchforks and brandish their torches. Joining them at the Capital Hill Tea Party were many House Republican leaders.

House Minority Leader John Boehner termed the Democrat's House health-care bill the "greatest threat to freedom I have seen," an astounding claim to make of a country fighting two wars, wrestling with solutions to climate change and pulling itself out of the worst economic decline since the Great Depression.

Of course, it might depend on one's perspective; Boehner was speaking to a crowd carrying signs equating Democratic reform to the Nazi Holocaust and questioning the president's citizenship.

At Davidson, several doctors said the nation's current treatment of sick people is the real threat.

"I think change is in order," said Dr. Rosamond Rhodes, professor of Medical Education and Director of Bioethics Education at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and one of three panelists at Thursday's Health Care Reform: Politics, Economics and Ethics symposium.

She presented a litany of flaws she sees in the current system — extremely high compensation for insurance company execs, an employer-based system that's bad for enterprise and employees, and inane coverage rules that, for example, in some states allow domestic-abuse victims to be denied coverage on the grounds of a pre-existing condition.

But, Rhodes said, what really irritates her is that in a great country like the United States, we will tolerate a health-care system that allows gross inequities.

From 1988 through 2005, 17,000 sick children died from a lack of health insurance, a Johns Hopkins Children's Center recently reported.

Another recent study done by Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance reported 45,000 Americans die annually from a lack of health insurance.

Rhodes sees potential trouble looming in those deadly statistics. She reminded audience members of the Newark, N.J., riots, where more than two dozen died, hundreds were injured and millions of dollars of property damage were sustained over six days of unrest in 1967. The culprit, she said, was inequities that finally led the downtrodden to lash out.

Under that thinking, fixing health care comes down to what might be called riot prevention. The disenfranchised will sit idly by for only so long. The parent of a sick child can watch the little one suffer for only so long. She will invariably ask why the U.S. system is so great for the well-to-do and potentially lethal for the less fortunate. Push those have-nots long enough, Rhodes suggests, and they'll be ready to "storm whatever it takes."

It calls to mind something said by one of the Capital Hill Tea Party organizers aiming to stop the current legislation.

"Nothing is more influential than an eyeball-to-eyeball meeting between a freedom-loving constituent and a member of Congress. Nothing scares a member of Congress more than freedom-loving Americans," Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said.

Then again, if those millions without insurance who had to bury a loved one who died due to a lack of coverage ever get a hold of Bachmann or any other congressman, a reordering of who is scary might be required.