S.J. Robinson is a former nurse, lawyer and authors. Her debut novel, The Price of Death, is a medical malpractice fiction illustrating the startling events that go on behind the scenes in our health care system. You think you know what is wrong with our health care system? You need to read this book. See more of S. J. Robinson’s information about our health care system and, more importantly, how to fix it, at . www.sjrobinson.com/


We have been relying on the free enterprise system to provide us with many of our needs for a long time—food, clothing, medical care, housing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Why doesn’t it always work? Because no one is in charge!

A totally unregulated free enterprise system is like a room full of kindergartners without a teacher. The kids are likely to come up with some very creative ideas. The problem is that they don’t plan ahead.

We need some adults in charge, people with experience to set the guidelines for the kindergartners. That is what the government is supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, it failed with the banking sector and it is failing in our medical system.

In both these areas the government failed because the only goal it set was to make a profit. That’s right, by historical accident corporations are legally required to think of profits ahead of your welfare. The best way to do that is to convince the public to accept the least amount of service at the highest price. That is what caused banks to make loans that they knew were unlikely to be repaid, and why big pharma and insurance companies haven’t come up with an efficient, practical way to deliver health care to the millions of upcoming baby-boomers. We know what happened in banking, but did you know that the US spends twice as much on health care as any other country and we rank 37th in the world in health care delivery, just after Costa Rica?

Medicine has known for years that the human body has about a 50-year warranty and after that things start going wrong. We have also known that there are a number of baby-boomers who are approaching or have passed age 50, yet we continue to rely on the free-enterprise system to solve the problem of delivering health care to this burgeoning population. There are lots of good points about the free-enterprise system, but planning for this catastrophe under the old rules is not one of them.

We need adults in charge to reset the rules so that the kindergartners can come up with their great ideas in an environment that doesn’t kill us or them. Let’s reset the goals for private enterprise. The new rules should require the best, sustainable service possible for their customers, not making profits for their shareholders.