Medicare, it's been said for years, is "the third rail of American politics" - touch it and you're dead, politically speaking. Is it time to replace "Medicare" with "health care" in that old chestnut?

We may have to wait until the midterm elections in November for an answer to that question. However, although the particulars (if not the future) of the health care reform bills on Capitol Hill ("PelosiCare," anyone?) remain up on the air as I write this in late January, at least one lesson of the long and convoluted process that began last October is worth noting before our new future is upon us: Politics ain't pretty.

One thing is clear: The more Americans learn about the bills passed by the House and Senate, the less they like them.

According to a mid-January CBS News poll, about 60% of Americans disapprove of how Congress is handling health care reform. And if you look at some other polls, you might reasonably conclude that most Americans fall into three camps: those who dislike the bills because they go too far, those who dislike them because they don't go far enough, and those who see the need for reform, just not this reform.

I'll add a fourth camp made up of many of the people who also fall into the first three. These are the Americans who are disappointed - maybe even disgusted - by the spectacle that the process has become. First, they wondered how their elected representatives could vote in favor of a bill they had never read. Then, they were shocked by the highly partisan way the Democratic congressional leadership pushed the bills through both houses. (Did you notice when sometime back in December people stopped referring to the health care "debate"?)

They watched Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid buy off the handful of votes needed to drag his bill across the Senate's finish line by dispensing special favors - $300 million in Medicare funds; $100 million in Medicaid financing, etc.- and were appalled.

And they watched as the traditional method of reconciling two different bills - a joint conference committee meeting in public to iron out the differences between them - was trashed in favor of a select few Democratic leaders and the White House chief of staff meeting secretly behind closed doors.

I'm solidly in this fourth camp, and maybe you are too. This republic has survived a lot in its 234 years, to put it mildly, and it will survive health care reform. But at what cost? Next month, we'll start answering that question.