Best Business Practice in DC? Benchmark Health Care, School, Policing and Regulation Against Those Doing Far Better than is the US

In business, a corporate leader who refuses to study and adapt to best practice -- claiming "that is not the way we do things" -- generally gets moved out in a hurry.

If the US were to take advantage of the best business practices, it would benchmark (1) HEALTH CARE; (2) POLICING; (3) PUBLIC SCHOOLING; and perhaps even (4) PUBLIC POLICY/REGULATION against the best in the world.

As our practices in these four areas range from pathetic to fair, it could only lead to improvements. As these four areas are very important, the impacts could be massive.

In healthcare alone we do very poorly at two to three times the expense of civilized nations. Let me repeat that: universal health care with far better health outcomes for rich and poor is had elsewhere at 1/2 to 1/3 what we pay in the US. The American trade-off is that millions die with inadequate care, millions go bankrupt trying to stay alive without health insurance, we all die three years younger than citizens of nations with good health care, but we can proudly say that our Big Pharma, Health Insurance, and Hospital Execs are filthy rich.

A President who brought business practices to the Oval Office would create task forces charged with hiring men and women from around the world to find the best practices against which we could benchmark our new designs, then hire, say, French, Italian, and other top health system leaders to help us rebuild our system from scratch. We'd clearly hire Finnish public education leaders to rebuild our schools. We'd hire Police leaders from Japan, France, Canada, Belgium, Germany and Australia to rebuild our police systems from the ground up. And for public policy, we'd get to use a lot of our own talent from Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, and U Michigan, but we'd bring in experts from places like New Zealand with a history of writing short, clear, well-designed, uncorrupted legislation.

The resistance would be furious and well-financed. Thousands of corrupt and gilded leaders in health care, Congress, policing and schooling would fight back. A President intent on bringing us back to the civilized world would have to build public sentiment in favor of reworking one-third of the economy, much of the public budget, and the legislative process. This would be an almost impossible task. It may not be possible at all to limit Congressional corruption, which is absolutely massive.

But when someone says: bring business leadership to Washington, this is what that means. Benchmark health care, education, policing, and regulation against civilized nations who are doing vastly better than are we.