"Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix" is the headline on a column by Eduardo Porter, which argues that "improving the delivery of social services like heath care and pensions may be possible without increasing the burden on American families, simply by removing the profit motive from the equation."
He writes that "handing over responsibility for social goals to private enterprise is providing us with social goods of lower quality, distributed more inequitably and at a higher cost than if government delivered or paid for them directly."
At least two responses come to mind. First, if Mr. Porter is so certain that direct government delivery of social goods is better than than private enterprise when it comes to health care and pensions, why stop there? Journalism is a social good, providing citizens with the information and context they need to make judgments in a democracy. Wouldn't it be cheaper and better to eliminate the profits of the shareholders of the New York Times (meager though those profits may be) and of other American news companies, and to just have all the journalists work for the government, which would pay to deliver the news to everyone?
Second, Mr. Porter's health-care examples contrast for-profit and church-affiliated non-profit nursing homes, or nonprofit hospitals that switched to become profit-making. But there's a different between an independent nonprofit and a service delivered directly by the government. Just ask anyone who has a choice in the matter whether they'd rather end up at non-profit New York Presbyterian Hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side or at government-run SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, or at non-profit Cedars-Sinai in L.A. or government-run L.A. County Medical Center. And there's plenty of profit being made at the non-profits, it's just being paid out in the form of physician and executive salaries.