If you’d like to “chat” about health care reform and you’ll be at your computer around 12:45 p.m. Wednesday, here’s an unusual opportunity:

Sen. Patty Murray and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are hosting an “online chat” to discuss the topic. They’ll be answering questions that have either been submitted in advance to Murray’s Web site or questions that come in during the session through a special page setup on Facebook.

To watch the on-line chat live, click here between 12:45 p.m. and 1:15 p.m.

To submit a question during the chat through Facebook, click here.

For those who are philosophically opposed to joining social networking sites on which people from whom they’ve successfully hidden for decades might find and “friend” them, you can submit a question through Murray’s Web site by clicking here.

There are so many statements about what health care reform will or won’t do, it’s hard to keep up.

Set up death panels?

Raise taxes?

Mandate sex change operations?

Town hall meetings aren’t really the best place to get questions answered, or to separate the fact from the fiction. But Politifact.com has set up a simple truth or fiction meter on many of the claims.

You can find it here.

On Thursday, Spokane Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick gathered with other city officials and about 100 of officers and civilian employees to talk about how the department might have to cut about $2 million in 2010. Tomorrow, Sen. Maria Cantwell will meet with about a dozen members of the local medical community for a roundtable to discuss improvements to the health care system.

These two very different meetings had two things in common.

 One is that they involve issues of major public concern. If the city cuts the Police Department by $2 million, it’s a pretty good bet we’ll have fewer cops on the street. Improving or reforming the health care system also affects the public – or at least those who get sick at some point in their life.

The other common element was that the public wasn’t, or in the case of Cantwell’s health roundtable isn’t,  invited and for pretty much the same reason people often use when they want to meet away from the public eye:  Allowing the news media and the public in would inhibit the free exchange of comments and ideas.

In other words, people who have wise or valuable or otherwise important stuff to say might not say it in front of strangers. Or folks who don’t think like them. Or who don’t know what they know. Or who don’t understand what they understand.