After listening to President Obama’s passionate plea for a government-run health care system, people should throw out a challenge.

If the government can show one business or program that they run well, then we’ll listen to more. We can call this challenge “the merit system” i.e., you don’t get more responsibility until you prove yourself.

• The Post Office has turned a profit something like two times in the last 35 years.

• Medicare and Medicaid require doctors hire a staff to work through the government red tape, which adds to health care costs (why not fix that first?).

• Social Security, The IRS, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, The Border Patrol, you name it, it doesn’t work.

• And my favorite, the Veterans Administration, our current government-run health program. A veteran I work with needs to have a hip replacement. A month ago he was having pain, went in to see them and they said, “nothing wrong.” He asked to have X-rays done, at which point they said he needed the hip replaced. When? Well, maybe October at the earliest.

Maybe not.

One could go on and on, but before we hand the reins of a major, costly and cryptic health care reform over to the government, perhaps they should prove themselves first.