There's something you may not know about all the angry shouting and yelling that has been disrupting town hall meetings on health-care reform. It's all a plot to keep the public as distracted as possible from what the Republicans are cooking up behind closed doors.

What they don't want you to know, people, is what THEIR version of health-care reform would look like.

Here are some of the stealth provisions that conservatives want to sneak into any overhaul:

• No medical care for anyone with gunshot wounds, since guns are an inalienable right guaranteed by the Constitution.

• People with HIV/AIDS have to prove they're not homosexual before they can receive treatment, in order to uphold family values.

• Distribution of transplant organs, scarce vaccines and experimental surgeries will be determined by legalized online bidding, in support of the free-market system.

• Doctors who perform abortions or make abortion referrals will be marched in front of a pro-life firing squad.

• Only those U.S. citizens born in the United States will be allowed to see a doctor. Too bad for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• In deference to the "birthers" who insist that Mr. Obama's birth certificate is a phony, anyone born in Hawaii will have to prove citizenship through a new technology known as respiratory identification. Rulings will be made by a government "breath panel."

• Health insurance will be outlawed, since it spreads the risk among all subscribers, which is clearly socialism. Ditto for bulk buying of supplies, which lowers costs in direct defiance of the profit motive. Congress will be exempt from this provision, except for Democrats.

So why haven't you heard about any of these ghastly, hideous plots? There's only one explanation. Nobody else has invented them yet -- just me, just now. Clearly, someone has been falling down on the job. Otherwise, these complete fabrications would have percolated up by now from the Bizzaro universe to the bloggers to the talk-show hosts to prime time.

It's a shame, too. Such a missed opportunity. I mean, if we're going to pervert and corrupt the public discourse about health-care reform, shouldn't we be corrupting it in both directions?

Shouldn't every phony charge and outright lie from the wing nuts on the right merit an equally ridiculous counter-charge from the other side? Hasn't this become the American way?

Yet Democrats have been strangely absent from this fiction-writing competition. President Barack Obama seems disinclined to fight fire with fire. He keeps expecting us to act like grown-ups, listen to the evidence, consider the facts and not get sidetracked by deliberate distortions and dirty tricks.

Which is weird. He is, after all, a student of U.S. history.

Meanwhile, the nut jobs are commandeering much of what passes for "debate" on the health-care reform. They're busy ginning up phony claims, scaring people with fact-free premises, fanning the flames of paranoia.

There's a lot of free-floating rage out there among the Obama-haters, much of it to no avail. All it needed was the right channel, and health care seems to be it. This is their chance to push the president over a cliff. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said as much in a July conference call with conservative activists.

"If we're able to stop Obama on this," he said, "it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Thus, town hall attendees are hollering about "socialism," even though a good number of them would be sicker or dead if not for such "socialist" programs as pooled health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

Investor's Business Daily editorialized that any resemblance to United Kingdom-style health care would mean people like physicist Stephen Hawking "wouldn't have a chance." Oops. Mr. Hawking happens to live in England. In response to the editorial, he told The Guardian that the opposite was true about the National Health Service: "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

Sarah Palin is fulminating about "death panels," as if counseling on end-of-life issues equals euthanasia.

And Charles Grassley, the GOP senator from Iowa, is telling constituents "you have every right to fear" a government program to determine if you're "going to pull the plug on Grandma."

Pull the plug on Grandma? If we can't blunt this kind of nonsense with calm and reasoned discussion, there's only one other way to go.

The Republican health-care plan calls for unisex bathrooms. Pass it on.