The Indian Health Service has been wrongly used by opponents of health-care reform in the United States to distort the issue to their advantage, Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin said Tuesday.

And she doesn't much care for it.

"That irritates me," the South Dakota Democrat said during a meeting with the Rapid City Journal Editorial Board.

Herseth Sandlin said there's no legitimate comparison between the IHS and its system of facilities and health-care providers and the public-insurance option that is being discussed as part of a health-care reform package by Democratic leaders in Congress.

"We're talking about an insurance option, not the government setting up the equivalent of IHS clinics across the country and not funding them properly, like IHS over the last eight-plus years," she said. "So we're talking apples and oranges."

In a recent Journal story, Gov. Mike Rounds recently used the financially troubled IHS as an example of how far things could go wrong with too much government involvement in a health-care system.

National Fox News followed with its own coverage, and opponents of the reform package have since used the publicity to attack the public health-insurance option unfairly, Herseth Sandlin said, avoiding any direct criticism of Rounds.

Herseth Sandlin doesn't support the current version of health-care reform in the House. And she said it's increasingly doubtful that a public health-insurance option can survive as part of the reform package. But it's unfortunate that the public option has been used as a "straw man" by advocates on both sides of the issue in rhetorical wars that distort reality and accomplish little, she said.

The public option is "not essential" to making an important beginning to health-care reform this year but it should be discussed and debated factually, she said.

"We shouldn't be taking a system plagued by funding shortages and suggesting that's the system everybody's going to get," she said.

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com