What Montpelier and Burlington Can Teach us About Healthcare 
By Rob Roper

P.J. O'Rourke couldn't have been more right when he said, "Giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." This hypothesis is proving itself in Burlington and Montpelier as the mayors of those cities, Democrat Mary Hooper and Progressive Bob Kiss, deal with scandals involving fiscal incompetence and questionable ethics that will cost their constituents dearly.

Apart from the obvious local implications, these incidents should give every Vermonter pause as we consider a national, government-run health care program. Recall that proponents of the scheme are saying it will be paid for in great part by reductions in waste and abuse. (Ask Hooper how well government deals with that task.) And, to believe in the hope of a public option health care plan, we must have faith that politicians and government bureaucracies can run a complex business structure well enough to deliver goods and services more efficiently than the private sector without having to ultimately screw the taxpayers. (Calling Mayor Kiss!)

Look at Kiss' Burlington Telecom scandal. Voters/Taxpayers were promised they would be held harmless as the "more efficient" government would  compete with the private sector to deliver "Universal" (there's that word again) high speed internet, telephone, and cable TV services to every resident in Burlington. Sounds great. In reality, the Burlington city government has no magic wand for delivering superior service at less cost. It's an expensive and complicated system and, because it's government, these challenges are compounded by the fact that key decisions are being made by elected amateurs who, at the end of the day, really don't know a damn thing about how to run a telecommunications company, and don't care so much because it's not their money at risk.

When these politicians failed to deliver their promised plan, there is not honest mea culpa. They try to protect themselves and their program; in this case by (potentially illegally) sticking the taxpayers with a $17 million liability - something that was promised never would happen.

These are not bad people with evil motives. That is not the lesson to be learned here. The lesson we should bring to the health care debate (and really any debate where politicians are clamoring for a larger more intrusive, more expensive role in our lives) is that we should not be handing government these tasks in the first place. First of all, no system that is governed by a group of 535 diverse legislators with different interests, political pressures, a million other things to do, and a series of checks and balances muddying the process, and no risk of being immediately fired if the plan fails is going to deliver any service efficiently and in a financially sustainable way. It's logistically impossible.

This is why Burlington Telecom, a government run attempt at a private enterprise, is a financial disaster. It's why Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. It's why the postal service in need of perpetual taxpayer bailouts. It is why Dirigo health care in Maine is a bust, TennCare in Tennessee imploded, and Massachusetts government run plan is wild expensive mess. We keep getting burned, yet we keep going back to government expecting it to deliver what it is incapable of producing. We humans are a weird species.

Rob Roper is Chairman of the Vermont GOP