Necessity may be the mother of invention. But in politics, it takes a crisis to give birth to “reforms writ large.” From Sputnik to “An Inconvenient Truth,” anxiety has been the advocate’s ally. Scare us and we just might buy what you’re selling. That’s the approach health care reformers are taking again this year.

There’s a reason for scare tactics. Most Washingtonians live reasonably comfortable and secure lives. We’re generally satisfied with our jobs and homes, and we can be downright smug about this state’s quality of life.

We’re naturally reluctant to embrace change. So when the reformers come around, they first try to rattle our complacency, to warn us of the crisis behind the curtains.

Accordingly, health care challenges come with exclamation points. Millions uninsured! Costs skyrocket! Not enough doctors! Drugs unaffordable! Greedy insurance companies deny coverage!

The drumbeat pushes us to extremes. A crisis response must be massive, not measured. When the house is on fire, it’s too late to talk about prevention, smoke detectors or sprinkler systems. You don’t fight fires with water pistols.

The crisis-responders demand radical change, always involving more government, more regulation and higher taxes. From a complete government takeover (“the single-payer model”) to the massive Massachusetts “Connector” experiment (which forces individuals and small groups to buy their insurance from a state-sanctioned pool), reformers try to rationalize the system by denying the market. These efforts rarely work and lack popular support. The recently-passed Massachusetts reform is already in trouble.

Reformers cannot acknowledge that there is no crisis. If they do, their political agenda falls apart. But, in fact, things are much better than we’ve been told. This year, about 66 percent of employers offer health insurance, a number that’s been pretty stable for at least three years. If you lack insurance, it may be a personal crisis, but for the system, it’s a problem that can and should be managed without scrapping what’s working well for most people.

A study by the AHIP Center for Policy and Research finds that Washington had the second most affordable small group premiums in the country, $234 per employee, in 2006. That’s less than the current estimated cost of the individual policies required by the Massachusetts legislation.

Very small companies in our state have access to affordable health care through associations and other member-governed groups (Disclosure: My employer offers one). After the government-run health care legislation adopted here in 1993 proved unworkable, Gov. Mike Lowry, lawmakers and business groups worked in 1995 to expand employer-based coverage. Taking measured, incremental steps they found a way to get health insurance to as many as 500,000 people.

There’s more good news. According to a poll conducted for the Association of Washington Business by Moore Information and Davis, Hibbits and Midgehall, the overwhelming majority of voters (94 percent) have health care coverage and most of them (87 percent) are satisfied with it. While we would expect coverage to be lower among nonvoters, these findings are nonetheless astonishing, as are these: 57 percent are not worried about rising health care costs, 72 percent don’t worry about being able to afford necessary health care, and 87 percent say that costs have not prevented them from getting health care in the past year.

Yet, 70 percent say they do not believe that most people in the state have adequate health care coverage. Sure, some people, maybe many people, don’t have adequate health care coverage. But most people do. Blame two factors for the misperception: We generalize too much from our own perceptions, and most of us have either been without insurance for some time or know someone who has. And, the media and reformers have done a bang-up job of highlighting the plight of the uninsured, focusing on the most dramatic, if unusual, cases.

Yes, there’s a problem. But it’s one we can successfully address with systematic, targeted and incremental reforms, as the state did when it allowed association plans to expand. As the appeal of those plans demonstrates, deregulation – not more regulation – can be the key to expanding health insurance coverage. Let’s not allow a crisis mentality to cause us to abandon what is currently working well for millions of Washingtonians.