Three of the nation’s biggest health charities found nothing to laugh about when Comedy Central’s The Daily Show this week  featured a segment mocking them for opposing a bill to encourage Americans to exercise, quit smoking, and take other steps to improve their health. Now they are fighting back to explain their side of the story.

In the four-minute segment, former Representative Kathy Dahlkemper, a Pennsylvania Democrat, told the comedian Wyatt Cenac that the charities essentially killed a proposed 2009 bill that would have required health-insurance companies to provide discounts to consumers who tried to reduce their risks of heart attack or other diseases.

In the taped piece, Ms. Dahlkemper accused the charities of preventing the bill from getting approved with their lobbying. She said that in the week after she introduced it, “we started getting visits from the…

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