As the national health care debate has played out, it’s a great example of how to become an idiot.

Health care is COMPLICATED.  Taking a “principled position” enables people to feel justified in ignoring the deeply interwoven complexities of this issue.  Please stop to consider these upsetting points of fact:

• To my friends on the right: health care doesn’t, can’t and won’t work like any other “free market” service. Unrestricted competition works for craft beer or a Louis Vuitton handbag, and where supply and demand create an equilibrium.  It’s not free market when if have a heart attack you can go into any facility and get treated, without knowing what the price is, or often without the ability to pay.
• To my friends on left who believe that all people should be treated equally: I was once driving with my young son who asked how health care costs work. There were two cars in front of us – a Mercedes and a Ford Focus.  I asked him, “Which would you pick if a stranger whom you’d never meet was paying?”  We just don’t have enough money to buy everyone “Mercedes” health care.  People with more money will get more care.

We need to accept that our world is complex and we need to approach problems with thoughtfulness.  Capitalism is another example where dogmatic positions are flawed. Seth Godin @ThisIsSethsBlog ‏ did a better job than I can in his thought-provoking essay, “Unbridled,” in which he suggests we think more clearly about just how much we want the “markets” to run our economy.

Our world is COMPLICATED and simple answers, while convenient, are generally wrong.  Work and business are complicated too.  A great book to read to really appreciate the complex nature of decisions in an entrepreneurial environment is The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz @bhorowitz ‏.