Why do ten deaths a year caused by defective Firestone tires get more attention from the media and Congress than an estimated ninety-eight thousand deaths resulting from medical errors in hospitals? Because Firestone is not a sacred cow.

Why do we tell the Russians to quit trying to run their economy through a centralized command-and-control bureaucracy and then do nothing to change the system when the Health Care Financing Administration, with its 132,000 pages of regulations, sends letters to ninety-year-old dying widows in hospices charging them with fraud for not dying in the time allowed by those regulations? Because Russian bureaucracy is vulnerable and HCFA is a sacred cow.

Why do we attack bureaucracy in HMOs and then propose new government bureaucracies to oversee the insurance bureaucracies and claim that this will protect patients? Because the third-party payment system for health care is a sacred cow.

Why do you use an ATM to get cash effortlessly and then fill out health information manually for your pharmacist for the fiftieth time in your life? Because banks have been forced to modernize and the health system is a sacred cow.

Join AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich as he tackles these and other sacred cows of health care.