Faced with the prospect of Wisconsin adopting universal health insurance, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce has produced a document called “Wisconsin’s Healthier Choices for Affordable Health Care.”

The report says “the problem of increasing health care costs has no single cause,” but it blames the government for virtually everything that ails the health care system. It’s single-minded focus on government reveals a huge blind spot -- the worship of a supposedly infallible private sector.

In WMC theology, the private sector is never inefficient, bureaucratic or malevolent. Those who actually deal with private-sector health insurance plans know better. Americans must cope with a private-sector health care bureaucracy that gobbles up 31 cents of every health care dollar spent, and much of that bureaucracy is devoted to a shell game in which employers, health insurance carriers and hospitals do everything possible (ethical or not) to avoid the fixed costs of health care.

While most health insurance companies make good-faith efforts to pay legitimate claims, it’s not hard to find stories of people who paid thousands of dollars in health care premiums only to discover their insurance carrier had created a bogus excuse to deny payment.

WMC can make all the recommendations it wants about charging nursing students higher tuition and “ongoing development of private sector initiatives for collection and public reporting of quality, safety and cost information,” but the fundamental problems are these:

u Skyrocketing health care costs paired with skyrocketing income and wealth inequality. Private health insurance premiums could drop by 20 percent tomorrow and still remain beyond the reach of the working poor.

u Increased deregulation, including tort reform, which makes it extremely difficult to hold the private sector accountable when it willfully breaches health insurance contracts. The problem is exacerbated by campaign contributions that dictate policy choices and compromise regulatory agencies.

The ultimate question is whether everyone, regardless of economic circumstance, deserves the same level of quality health care and if WMC’s faith in “consumer-driven” health care guarantees that outcome. Perhaps those questions will be addressed in the next WMC report.