National Health Care: A Primer

Let’s keep it simple. National Health Care cannot work because no one in government knows anything at all about running a business providing health care or an insurance company paying for health care.

The debate in this country currently starts from the premise that health care is not available to a large segment of the population, and thus needs to be fixed. Implicit in this argument is that the “free market” has no incentive to provide health care to the poor and destitute of our country. This puts a class warfare analysis on the debate that quite frankly completely misses the point. The real question is if private sector ‘laissez faire’ health care cannot provide for these people, why is government more equipped to do so?

Providing health care to people is a complex business, involving an understanding of the relationship between assets and liabilities, inventory levels, employment of highly educated (and compensated) doctors and less highly educated (and less compensated) para-doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, and unpaid volunteers, and also knowledge of such business arcane as ownership of real estate versus financing or leasing real estate, and the reasons for doing the former rather than the latter or the latter rather than the former, as well as understanding the benefits and burdens of being “For Profit” or a “Non-Profit” health care entity. And this only touches the surface of the awful complexity of running a minor hospital in a minor demographic of America.

Who among the readers of this Post qualifies to run such an enterprise? I don’t, and with understated humility I acknowledge that I am highly educated, at least as much as most of the proponents of government run health care. But I am more honest than them: I freely admit that no minor hospital in any small community would hire me to run their business, because I have not the slightest experience or clue how to do so with any efficiency at all.

Except for their ability to channel huge amounts of Federal dollars (aka your tax dollars) to a local hospital, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer or anyone else of the major proponents of national health care would not even be considered as a CEO of the smallest 1,000 health care providers in America. Make that 2,000, or 4,000 or as high as you want. Without the political power to distribute your tax dollars, these people would be simply unemployable in the health care industry because they have no experience, education or performance history in delivering health care that would raise even the slightest interest in any functioning hospital seeking executive talent.

As John Derbyshire remarked to me in an email recently, “These people couldn’t even run a lemonade stand.” So true. Why then would any sentient citizen of the United States want them to run their health care? .