Corporations Are Incompetent

What is being left out of this health care debate (if you can call the vitriol coming out of the right a debate) is the utter incompetence of most corporations. It is not an accident that corporations are incompetent, in fact the entire legal entity of a corporation is designed to encourage incompetence. It is tantamount to national suicide to continue to permit corporations to have anything whatsoever to do with health care, a fact which is being debated between the moderates and the left, but which the right wing ignores in their adulation for everything corporate. Yet we all know that corporations are horrible at what they do.

Corporations are Unsustainable
We see everyday that corporations are unsustainable. Just this year, the U.S. Government, and the many other governments throughout the world, have had to swoop in and bail out thousands of corporations which were failing. The U.S. Government, in substantially the same form that it stands today, has outlasted almost every corporation in the world, and has done so with such amazing success that even today there is no threat (despite what Glen Beck may desire) that the U.S. will not be a beacon of hope and freedom for huddled masses throughout the world. Meanwhile, corporations are constantly going into bankruptcy and folding into one another, or merely liquidating and disappearing. If we rely on corporations for necessities like health care, we will are relying on some of the most fragile organizations on earth. The moment that a corporation stops making enough profit (that means more than just profit, but profit mixed with greed), the corporation will raise its prices or merely leave the market. That is the job of a corporation; maximizing profit at the expense of its customers, its government, and all moral and ethical considerations.

Corporations are Unaccountable
We all know that corporations don't want to listen to their customers. Although corporations make it out to seem as though their customers are their friends, in fact corporations and customers are necessarily opposed. As competing entities entering into one contract, each party necessarily attempts to get as much out of the contract as it can. Verizon and Comcast cable seem like they are on your side when they lobby congress to implement fewer controls on internet distribution, but they have ultimately charged more in the United States for broadband internet than in any other country in the world, including island nations with limited resources. That is because the position of customer to corporation is naturally hostile. The fact that they have to woo you in order to ensure that you buy from their corporation is meaningless because advertising does the wooing and advertising is purposefully misleading.

Of course, corporations are supposed to be unaccountable. It's impossible to make any serious money unless the corporation treats the customer as though they are used, spent and discarded goods. If the corporation sells a service, then it will attempt to cultivate the customer, like a neglected house plant that you hope doesn't die. Occasionally, and for a short amount of time only, a corporation will make a good faith effort to hire enough customer service staff and offer the best product at the best possible price. The corporation gets some word of mouth, and attains incredible loyalty for merely making the least bit of good faith effort, for merely showing up at the party. But eventually, the economy must contract and the corporation has to do something to cut costs. Maybe the first two or three economic down turns the corporation rides the wave, maybe eventually it cuts services or stops taking as many risks. But at some point, the shareholders (who are lean and anxious for profits) vote in a new board of directors, who vote in a new president (often in a hostile takeover situation) and the new president is desperate to keep his (usually male) job. In order to keep his job, he must appease the board immediately, and the board must appease the shareholders, so the new president must make cuts and raise profits and pull dividends immediately. The fastest way to do that is to cut from the customer service budget. With each computerized telephone answering service, and redirection to India, and separating out of phone rooms between offices, cities, states, countries, and continents, the service gets cheaper, slower, and less responsive and OH SO PROFITABLE that Donald Trump gets turned on just thinking about it!!!!!!!

The Beginning of Corporations: The End of Competence
We all know intuitively that corporations are incompetent. We have all been on hold for hours attempting to fix a typo made by a data entry professional in India that the corporation refuses to accept was a typo. This is how profits are made. Hopefully, the customer will eventually give up and pay instead of risking having their credit ruined after months of playing three hour long phone tag with the behemoth on the other end.

The corporation is designed to be incompetent. The corporation is a legal construct that does one thing. It makes it (very nearly) impossible to hold shareholders responsible for the losses of the corporation, and if shareholders aren't responsible (and they are the only ones with any power) than no one is responsible. It means that shareholders can invest $500 and the only thing that they may lose is that same $500, while potentially earning much much more. The shareholders hire the board of directors and the board hires everyone else. In the modern world, the shareholders are usually corporations themselves who are equally unaccountable and incompetent. The shareholders are large banks that vote on behalf of their own customers. The banks have a DUTY to make as much profit as they can for their customers. In order to do that, they have an OBLIGATION to find board members that ruthlessly chase after profits. That is a legal obligation. If they don't do that, they can actually be sued. The board is REQUIRED to hire a president and staff who all are interested in only one thing... net profits.

Nobody is accountable to anything except for profits, regardless of how they make profits. The only thing that is standing in the way of all that money is the customer. Thus, a corporation that knows that asbestos or the Pinto is killing people is legally obligated to decide whether or not it should continue to kill people based solely on the cost of litigating the wrongful death suits versus the cost of changing the design of the Pinto or recalling asbestos. Thus are corporations murderers, murdering solely for profit. In America, we would execute a person that killed hundreds of people motivated solely by profits, but yet Ford continues to exist because it is a corporation and thus all the shareholders, the bosses of the bosses of the bosses, are entirely protected for their homicides.

Get Corporations Out of Health Care
The only way to make health care accountable is to keep corporations as far away from it as possible, and this makes sense. Many of our ancestors died attempting to bring democracy to decision making in the United States, yet the right now wishes to have us remove all democratic decisions from our choices in health care. The truth is that democratic methods are dangerous and scary but they are the best method we have been able to determine to make any kind of good faith society wide decisions. If we admit that health care is a society wide problem then we must admit that health care requires a society wide solution. The only way to have a society wide solution is through democracy, that premise is the one on which America is founded.