I've heard it said so many times: Our government needs to be run more like a business. People running for office tell us that they are qualified because they were CEO of (list successful, profitable companies here) and this experience will translate to them becoming a good legislator or president or governor or whatever.

Why?

When you think about it, the goals of a business are fundamentally different (and by that I mean they are almost opposite) from the goals of our government. They shouldn't be, you say? If that's your position, well, then, you are fired!

Ridiculous, right? You can't be fired from being a citizen of the United States, can you? Does that even make sense?

A corporation's main goal, no matter what sort of stuff they spew about social responsibility, is to make money for its shareholders. Anything that goes contrary to this goal is cut out, off, whatever you want to call it. A division is unprofitable? Then shut it down and lay off the employees. Or sell it off to another company, who then lay off employees and installs its own management and systems until it becomes profitable. Or they sell it off for parts. Whatever. People don't factor into the decisions too much in this day and age.

If we understand this, we can't get too mad when corporations do anything aimed at improving their bottom line. That includes insurance companies, who as my readers (if such things exist) might know, are not favorites of mine.

A government's main goal is addressing the needs of its citizenry. Almost by definition, this goal is inherently unprofitable. Do we need defense? Costs money, doesn't return any money, at least not to the government. Do we need an educated populace? Costs money. (Though, actually, this could be viewed as an investment towards increasing the taxes the educated person will pay during their lifetime.) Health care, like Medicare? Costs BIG money!

If government were to run like a business, we would have to cut those services that don't generate a profit. Which, pretty much, would eliminate government totally.

Then we would band together as a community (in this case, a large, 300+ million person community) and decide that we needed some sort of national defense, and we would agree to pay for said defense collectively. We might then further decide that we need some sorts of police and fire services, and that we would pay for these services collectively.

We might even get to education pretty quickly, and say that our kids deserve to be educated, and said education would benefit all of us in this community by training our children to do the jobs that need doing to insure the well being of community members, old and young. And that we were going to band together, since it is in our collective self interest to have an educated youth, and collectively pay for this education.

We might then get to health care, and realize that we should all have access to needed medical services. We've already paid to train our youth to provide these services, but now we have to pay for the services, and we might decide that we, collectively, are going to pay for them.

So we collect all this money, an even amount from everyone, and pay for these services. But since there are 300 million of us dividing up the cost of these services, we need some sort of service to collect the money from everyone. And then we have some people who are unemployed, or disabled, or old, or whatever, who can't pay their shares, so maybe we ask some of the people who can best afford it to pay a little more so we can cover those folks.

And we're right back to where we started, but perhaps with a better understanding of what our government is supposed to do.

I know this is overly simplistic. But so is the notion that just because someone has been successful running a business, where the only people he or she has to answer to are the shareholders, that they automatically have some sort of magical qualification to serve in government.

Cost cutting is pretty heartless. If you have a heart, it's hard to cut costs. I know this from personal experience. I have colleagues who make a lot more than me, who take every business course and take what they learn there as gospel. I choose not to do that. I have to balance out what I can live with and is best for my employees and for my patients as well as for the stockholder in my business (me). When I was laid up with a broken ankle and wasn't producing any income for us, I tried my darnedest to not cut hours overly much or to raise fees overly much. It may not have been the smartest business decisions, but it worked for me and I continued to sleep okay at night.

Do we really want heartless cost-cutters as our government? I don't.

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