Many of you are not going to believe what I am about to tell you. It will fly in the face of everything you believe.

Some of you might call me a communist or socialist. But what I am going to say is hardly grounded in ideology.

Listen close, because if you really consider the facts, you might end up agreeing with me.

The free market isn’t always better, at least not when it comes to delivering health care. Sometimes, private enterprise is so loaded with bureaucracy, inefficiency and red tape that filing your taxes seems painless, quick and easy.

And the best example of this is private health insurance, which cannot effectively deliver health care to all U.S. citizens and still maintains profitability. A significant percentage of the population is stricken with the high premiums private insurers must charge to stay in business.

And it is literally a matter of life and death.

More than 18,000 uninsured Americans die each year because of delayed necessary medical care, according to a study last year by the Institute of Medicine. To put that in perspective, it’s about six times the number of people who died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The number of uninsured people is so great that it outnumbers the populations of Texas, Florida and Connecticut — combined.

Not only does private health insurance leave a big chunk of the population uncovered, it is more expensive than public insurance.

And not by a little, but by a lot.

In 1998, $3,701 a person was spent on health care in the United States. Canada, which has a single payment form of health insurance, spent $2,049 a person. As a result, the United States spent 14.2 percent of its gross domestic product on health care. Canada only spent 9.6 percent.

Collectively, we paid more for less. And insurance isn’t getting any cheaper.

Conservatives charge that Canadians hate national health care, but the evidence says just the opposite. In one poll, 96 percent of Canadians preferred their system to the U.S. model. Other studies have shown Medicare, which is what Canadians call their health program, to be the country’s most popular government program.

I know. It makes no sense.

From birth, we are taught that anything the government can do, businesses can do better. Government doesn’t have to compete with anything we are told, so it is complacent and resistant to change. Since there is no profit motive, agencies have no incentive to cut costs.

In the twisted world of Washington, we are led to believe that government agencies seek to increase costs even if it’s not warranted because their prestige is measured by the size of their budget.

Some of that is true, of course, but most of it is rooted more in ideology than reality.

Large CEO salaries and the necessary profit motive aside, private health insurance is more expensive because it is decentralized. Each insurance company must hire its own army of bureaucrats, who examine claims, shuffle paperwork and pay hospitals. Work that would otherwise be done only once in a public agency is duplicated several times over in the free market.

About a quarter of all health care workers do not deliver medicine at all; they sort through the endless array of forms and paper work that insurance companies, hospitals and doctors require.

One study showed that for every dollar the insurance industry received in 1988, it paid 33.5 cents for administration, marketing and overhead — and that doesn’t include profits. That’s more than 11 times what the Canadian system paid for those expenses.

And the most repugnant aspect of the insurance industry is that it actually spends money — and lots of it — to deny coverage.

Insurance companies cannot offer affordable coverage to the neediest, sickest U.S. citizens and stay in business. It thus has to spend millions to ensure which groups are a gamble, a process known as underwriting. These underwriters separate the population into groups in an effort to generate a profit from each one. Young, healthy people make up one, the elderly and disabled another.

The end result is that those, who need health insurance the most, are effectively cheated.

Because of the insurance industry’s hesitation to take a risk, taxpayers are left footing the bill for the elderly and the poor through Medicare and Medicaid. (Not that insurance companies should be charities; I’m just illustrating the limitations of private insurance.)

Republicans and moderate Democrats have tossed around proposals to create de facto universal coverage through tax credits. But this does nothing to correct the inherent flaw of private insurance.

If anything, it encourages inefficiency by feeding the beast.

We are a country of rugged individualists who love capitalism and distrust the government. And to a certain extent, are rightly so.

But we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by assuming business is always better.
And then we’re paying more to clean the wound.

Opinion Editor Brandon Ortiz is a junior news-editorial journalism major from Fort Worth.