By John Reichard, CQ HealthBeat Editor

Many were the days when hunting for news and wary of being scooped, I picked up my phone, punched Alec Vachon’s number and heard a clipped greeting at the other end of the line: “Vachon.”

Just like the sound of his name, Vachon, who died Dec. 5 after a long illness, was terse and to the point. He was razor-sharp, a focused thinker who had no patience for baloney. But oh, did he have an enormous capacity for fun.

A consultant for many years and a GOP aide on the Senate Finance Committee before that, Alec was an important but not terribly well-known figure in the health policy community. His memory deserves to be honored and his career to be remembered simply because of how much he knew. Vachon probably knew the fine points of health policy as well as anyone. That knowledge helped keep reporters and his clients at the leading edge of the flow of information that drives health policymaking.

I suspect, too, that it helped keep more than a few of the aides on the Hill and in the executive branch — those people on whom lawmakers and government officials relied for expertise — at the top of their games.

A native of Massachusetts, Vachon worked on physician payment and other Medicare issues during his tenure on Senate Finance in the 1990s. He served on the panel during its negotiations on the 1997 balanced budget law. As a consultant, he advised companies in the long-term care and dialysis industries.

But for me, what really makes Alec’s career notable is that it’s a reminder that the health policy world really is a community and of how rewarding it can be because of the relationships involved and the stimulating work that people do.

Alec really helped nurture the conversation through his quirky and somewhat notorious email publication, Health Notes. And that’s ironic given how intensely private he was otherwise.

Through Health Notes, Alec drew that community in by making himself the hub of inside information. To get good stuff from Alec, you found yourself trying to give him good information. The more inside Health Notes got, the more people wanted to be a part of it, and the bigger his web of contacts grew.

Alec reported things most reporters would not publish through the innovation of calling unsubstantiated information “chatter.” What a concept! If you call something chatter, you’re alerting people that it may or may not be true. And it sounds so benign. People chatter, right? So why not tell folks what the chatter is? If it’s wrong, well hey, you called it chatter. If it’s right, you’re the first to let everyone know.

Health Notes also had a catchy way of labeling people that was kind of mean but kind of true and kind of funny. Reporters collectively became “the press sheeple,” presumably because of our sometimes timid, and often herdlike, behavior. And Nancy Ann DeParle, increasingly inaccessible and increasingly powerful because of her elevation to the post of White House Office of Health Reform director, became “the tsarina,” which she found amusing.

Health Notes had other catchy lingo. To make Wall Street seem less alien to the policy crowd, Alec called it “Mr. Market.” And Health Notes brimmed with enthusiasm for upcoming policy events that Alec posted and wanted to watch. “Pop the Popcorn!” he would say in excitement about some obscure upcoming hearing.

Alec’s product got to be a big hit, and he got kind of cocky. He’d call reporters during and after their stakeouts of the health care overhaul negotiations, suggesting questions to ask negotiators after they came out and wanting a fill on what Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and others were telling the press. All this from the comfort of Health Notes headquarters — his apartment in Washington.

Health Notes reached the peak of its fame — well maybe infamy — on April Fool’s Day of 2009. Alec liked to make up a phony but plausible news story and run it in Health Notes at the start of every April. The more he did it, the more wary readers got.