What about health insurance companies? Do you want them to spend all of their money on health care for the folks who are insured? You know they have business expenses, but shouldn’t they have to tell us what fraction of the premium dollar goes to administrative costs and how much of it gets spent on health care? You’d rather they didn’t pay their executives huge salaries and bonuses. Whatever it takes to get the talent, sure, but be reasonable. And payouts to stockholders? Well, that won’t be an issue for a nonprofit. So it only stands to reason that you’ll be getting more for your premium dollar if you go with a nonprofit insurer.

Now you can see that what Congressman McClintock describes as the “Marxist notion that all profit is waste” is, in the broadest economic terms, surely nonsense, exactly as McClintock says it is.

But in the health care industry, the profit motive drives some very undesirable economic behavior, and really does divert money from being used efficiently to finance health care and to drive innovation in the most useful directions.

Dr. Solomon teaches emergency medicine to residents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh and is Medical Editor in Chief of ACEP News. He is a social critic and political pundit and blogs at www.bobsolomon.blogspot.com.