Rob Christensen wrote last Sunday that health care can’t be simple.
If somebody were to try to put today’s health-care system into a single bill, it would probably run to 100,000 pages or more. It is an incredibly complex system of physicians, hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacists, Medicare, Medicaid, HMOs, PPOs and nursing homes.The current system employs armies of lawyers, policy analysts, administrators, accountants, lobbyists, actuaries and others to keep track of it.
Rob is right that describing how health care in America works would take volumes of text. Journalism would take many volumes of text as well, though print journalism would play a smaller part in that description today than in the past. Should Congress write a bill that dictates what a reasonable source of news is and an adequate length for newspapers, which seem to shrink further in every dimension on a weekly basis? Maybe Congress could tell us how much analysis is allowed in a news article and how much reporting in an editorial or opinion column. Health care providers are limited in their scope of practice. Should reporters be similarly regulated so they can never write columns or books unless they go back to school to learn editorial writing? Maybe we can have an Independent Journalism Advisory Commission that advises people whether to buy the current issue of Fortune instead of the Economist. Would that have protected the lost jobs at McClatchy?
Leonard Read demonstrated the remarkable complexity of even a mundane object like a pencil. Markets arise so people can coordinate activity without having to plan every aspect of it.
The Ten Commandments lay out the rules of life in about 300 words (a little over a page). The Constitution created the federal government in 4,400 words (about 17.6 pages). There seems little reason for a health care reform bill to reach 1,000 pages, let alone 100,000 pages, unless the government wants to micromanage the system.
