The market economy has proven itself to be an absolute and utter failure. Those who insist that the "market" is the best way to run a country seem to be missing one of the basic feelings that human hearts have: care. Care means "to look after or to provide for" but in a market economy "care" gets in the way of profits and thus care has to be eliminated for the market to "work." The American healthcare system is the prime example of this but it is true for every industry the market economists and Wall Street financiers touch. Imagine for a moment what market economic principles would do to our publicly funded highway system. What would it be like if the highways and roads we drive on were owned by for-profit corporations? Toll booths would be set up, creating lines and delays. The costs of the toll booths would need to be recouped so the company would raise the tolls and also target maintenance costs, which would be cut to make the roads more profitable. Maintenance would be farmed out to a subcontractor, who would be forced to cut the quality of road building materials in order to stay cost competitive, so roads would not last as long, which would guarantee more maintenance business in the future. Their competitors would have to do the same--to stay competitive.

Pretty soon the American highway and road system would be a shambles. People would be delayed getting to work, the doctor or the store while vehicle maintenance costs skyrocketed due to damage from the poor roads. Meanwhile large companies extracting profits from monies intended for the building and maintaining of roads would be pursuing a costly, but tax deductible and very sexy, advertising campaign to tell us that American roads are the best in the world.

Because the roads are a critical link in the economy, companies would insist that the government pay huge subsidies to help them keep the roads in shape. With that, taxpayer costs for roads would double and triple in very short order, due to profit taking and burdensome bureaucratic management costs, while quality would continue to diminish as the government could no longer afford to maintain our highways.

That scenario sounds so awful and ridiculous that no one in their right mind would consider such an idea. However, that is exactly how the American healthcare system is being operated today: multiple companies in competition cutting costs to be profitable. The entry of for-profit, business-minded companies into health care was supposed to make it more efficient. Instead, it's given us the world's largest and costliest health care bureaucracy, engulfed by red tape and maddening complexity. In some areas of the country, waiting times for routine tests such as mammograms can stretch into months. Too often, treatment delayed means care denied.

America's health care system is totally out of whack. The market evangelists don't care about quality or efficiency. They care only about profits, which most people understand not to be "care" at all but greed.

Taxpayers subsidize the cost of pharmaceutical research and then pay more than anybody else in the world for the drugs produced through that research. Wall Street rewards investors who acquire health care properties and then cut staff and services to make the facilities more"profitable" and attractive to the next buyer. Doctors who make mistake after mistake are seldom sanctioned, driving up competent physicians' malpractice insurance premiums. Hospitals charge the highest prices to those least able to pay. Rather than health care for everyone, the free market has given us corporations with multibillion-dollar profits. As profits go up care goes down.

Although the system richly rewards a few, it fails to protect our most vulnerable citizens. It discourages diet and lifestyle changes in favor of billable pills and procedures. It discourages doctors from practicing in rural areas, where specialists are in such short supply that country children must depend on airlifts to big cities to perform routine operations. At the same time, the system has made it possible for unscrupulous practitioners to victimize elderly patients by performing painful, dangerous procedures that are unnecessary but highly profitable. Wall Street's medical ethics are in the gutter. Cheating people out of their money, their environment and even their lives has become the way to profitability.

Care--care for one another, care for our neighbors, for our children, even care for the planet we live on--is undermined by market economics. Yes, we have a care crisis in America, and a whole lot of care-and change--is the only thing that will fix it.

Howard Switzer is the Green Party of Tennessee Candidate for Governor and an activist writer

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