Energy company executives went to bed Sept. 14 with a new existential worry: drone attacks. These are added to the general fear of a cyberattack that could hobble an oil company or bring down the electric grid, or parts of it.

Final details are not in yet, but it is believed that an army of drones hit two Saudi oil processing facilities early on the morning of Sept. 14, causing huge fires.

Heretofore energy companies, especially pipelines and electric utilities, found drones to be a gift. Drones have enabled oil and gas companies to monitor pipelines and electric utilities to monitor their transmission lines.

They are doing the jobs that were done initially by men on horses, then by teams in trucks and jeeps and by line technicians in helicopters. Less expensive, less dangerous and more efficient, drones have been a godsend.

Much of this surveillance is now done by these small electric aircraft, not appreciably different than those the general public can buy in a sophisticated toy store.

The attack on the Saudi oil installations, with its resultant destructive fires, harbors horrors for the future that haven’t been part of the portfolio of future uncertainties faced by companies with large installations or thousands of miles of exposed lines and, in some cases, over-the-ground pipes.

The traditional posture of utilities to this kind of physical threat has been not to try to meet every possibility with a tailor-made defense, but rather to respond quickly.

In fact, rapid response is in the utility DNA — and honed in foul-weather events. If lines come down, the utilities, with military precision, try to get them up again. They stock replacement parts and have a network of crews from neighboring utilities on call. Worst case, they hope, will be a short blackout.

“It’s like a military operation. Think of action stations aboard a ship,” a utility executive says.

But as climate change has increased expectations for extreme weather events, and as the digital society has put new demands on electricity resilience, rapid response is inadequate going forward.

Undergrounding electric lines, previously thought to be prohibitively expensive, is now on the table in the C-suites of some utilities. Worry about drones is another endorsement of that option, where possible. But undergrounding is only a limited defense and it is very expensive and not suitable for major lines carrying vast amounts of power.

Oil and gas companies are more worried about the central facilities than they are about the distribution systems, as far as drone attacks are concerned. Oil refineries have always been vulnerable and now that vulnerability is exposed. While most refineries won’t go up in flames because a small drone with an ignition source hits them, this threat will increase as weaponized private drones grow in power and carrying capacity.

There is a growth industry in protecting vulnerable infrastructure. From secure communications to shields against drone attack, the battle for safety on the home front has been joined.

Drone terrorists have the advantage that drones are cheap, anonymous and the threat is disruption and panic, even if the actual damage is trivial. Off-the-shelf terrorism has arrived.

The public will worry about the security of nuclear plants. Actually, these are probably the safest of large energy facilities from aerial attack. The nuclear vitals are encased in feet of concrete, steel and lead that protects them from bombs and cruise missiles, let alone the new threat coming from those once-fun toys: drones.

The departments of Homeland Security and Defense are acutely aware of the threat from drones and are examining ways to defend against these, sources say. They see a battlefield where the location of the enemy might not be known and where it will be harder to determine whether the perpetrator of an attack is a state player or a terrorist organization.

Complex problems cannot be fixed with simple solutions — unless the problems have become so intricate and intractable that only a simple solution will work.

That may be where we are now with health care.

To some, the simple solution that unties the complicated knot is a single-payer system: Replace the whole complex, expensive and teetering system with something new and simpler.

Yet in the intellectual debate — where ideas are discussed long before they are codified into law — there are powerful forces aligned against real health care overhaul.

These are not just on the right, although conservative thinking is opposed to anything that suggests a larger government or even a community role in health care. Unions, which gain strength when they provide health care, do not want to see that leak away, nor do employees who are happy with the health care provided as part of their employment. Better keep that job.

There is also a phalanx of conservative economists who calculate that universal health care will be too expensive and bankrupt the country. This I find dubious because single-payer health care works. There is evidence. It is not uncharted territory. It works from Australia to Britain, from France to Japan.

In short, the advanced countries of the world all have a single-payer system. It costs them about half of the 18 percent of GDP we spend on health care. You might reasonably think something is wrong when you spend more and get less.

The fact is those who experience tax-paid health care like it. No one who has permanent health care, as in Canada or Britain, is asking for it to be ended. National health systems are fiercely defended by those who have them, bar none.

One organization that is fully committed to a single-payer system — also known as Medicare for All in the political debate — is Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP). It is a national group with headquarters in Chicago and 23,000 health care professional members. It is adamant in its advocacy of a single-payer system and takes aim at the health insurance companies as the source of what ails health care in America.

It rejects partial measures, such as beefing up the Affordable Care Act, improving Medicaid and lessening the effect on the poor in various ways. These, PNHP says, avoid the question at the center of the health care debate: What are the insurance companies for? What wound do they bind? The answer, according to PNHP, is none. They just add cost.

Every hospital, whether a for-profit or a community institution, employs huge staffs, sometimes well in excess of 100 people, for negotiating claims with insurance providers. That is a great burden on hospital costs right there, let alone the costs inside the insurance companies.

In decades of dealing with health insurance, which includes looking at it as a reporter, paying for it as an employer, and occasionally, receiving treatment under private insurance, I can tell you that Medicare is now one of the great improvements in my quality of life and peace of mind. I am also one of the few with the temerity to offer an opinion on health care who has received care, and watched members of my family receive it, under the British system.

I am a free-market person, someone who has and still runs his own business, albeit a very modest one, so I am not in love government for government’s sake.

But neither am I in love with state-sanctioned monopolies in insurance. The health insurance companies do not provide health care. They make it more expensive. They do not contribute to wellness. They make it more problematical.

We do not have a health care system. We have a lack of a system: a savage garden full of weeds, where medicine endeavors to grow while the gardeners stand around arguing over money.

PNHP may not have all the answers, but at least it is a pressure group trying to put something on the table, something that serves the rest of the developed world well: single-payer health care.

Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe, who stood head and shoulders above other awful African heads of state, has died aged 95. He may have killed more people and caused more deaths through starvation than even that other icon of evil, Idi Amin of Uganda.

When Mugabe became the republic’s first president in 1980, he was celebrated the world over as the face of the new Africa: a leader who would usher in a time of harmony, heal the wounds of war, and who was keen to assure the white minority he had overthrown that all would be well.

Mugabe spoke of the country that he inherited from Britain and the British settlers as kind of jeweled timepiece. He boasted of its sophisticated agriculture, its functional central bank and its vibrant stock exchange.

Initially, Mugabe’s partnership with the old regime appeared to be sincere. I met two white men who ran his security detail at that time who spoke well of him and said they had detected no bitterness. Early warnings, like his takeover of the newspapers, were ignored. To miscreants, the media is always the problem.

I was born and grew up in Rhodesia, as was my father, first known as Southern Rhodesia. I, like my family, wanted to ignore Mugabe’s downside. The period from the granting of independence to Zimbabwe — with the Lancaster House agreements in London — in 1980 to the mid-1990s was promising.

True, my brother was forced from his farm by squatters whom the police refused evict. But even so, he and his wife were remarkably optimistic, if a little apprehensive, when I visited from my perch in Washington in 1996.

Old friends were keen to believe, as were people around the world, that Mugabe was the new face of enlightened Africa. There were signs that pointed to a troubled future, but the people loved their country were loath to believe the worst.

More people worried about the communism Mugabe and his allies in the local university spouted than what was to become vicious and overt racism directed against not just the white settlers but all people of European descent.

For a few years, Zimbabwe remained what it had been before independence: a peaceful place with racial respect, a thriving commercial sector, and farms that were so productive that they represented the regional breadbasket, feeding Zambia and Malawi as well as exporting to South Africa.

Some trace Mugabe’s descent into dictatorial insanity to the release of Nelson Mandela from detention in South Africa and Mandela’s usurpation of Mugabe as the darling figure in the capitals of the world. There was a sexual overlay as well.

Both Mugabe and Mandela sought the hand of Graca Machel, the widow of Mozambican President Samora Machel, in marriage. Mandela carried off the damsel, and Mugabe’s descent accelerated.

Mugabe seized the primarily white-owned farms, played games with the citizenship of people he didn’t like; rigged elections; used violence against political opponents; and ordered, or condoned, the security forces, in violation court orders, to beat and intimidate anyone who opposed him.

He began to espouse a kind of paranoid racism, where everything that was wrong was because of the colonialism and the evils of the white population. It was always someone else’s fault.

In the end, Mugabe smashed his jeweled-timepiece nation. The currency failed when inflation ran into the millions of percent and today, over two years since Mugabe fell, Zimbabwe still has no currency. Under the new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, it continues to be beset with poverty and famine.

This is the message of Mugabe: Failure to stop the tendencies of those who get away with small constitutional infringements will lead to their getting away with massive wrongdoing.

Part of the dictator’s path is to buttress support by denigrating a particular group, then persecuting that group.

Mugabe started by sending his dreaded Fifth Brigade into the south of the country, where he killed an estimated 25,000 of the Ndebele people who had supported the opposition party and fought colonialism separately under their leader Joshua Nkomo.

Then it was on to seizing white property, white passports, and in the end driving out the commercial class. Hardly a Rhodesian remains in what was Rhodesia.

There are those who shrug at governmental transgression in the belief that the pendulum will swing back. Maybe, but not if it has broken the clock and is on the floor. That is the lesson of Robert Mugabe and the tragedy of the land of my birth.

The political chaos in Britain — and the situation in British politics is chaotic — can be laid at the base of two interventions by direct government usurping representative government.

The first is the intervention of polling. Polling, although useful and indeed invaluable most of the time, does restrict the free operation of representative government. The public state of mind the polling day affects the actions of its elected representatives and can inhibit new ideas as they evolve. In the defense of polls, they are reality check when politicians give way to intoxication with their own thinking. Polls are here to stay; an organic part of the political landscape.

Yet the deliberative process can be inhibited by them. It is no accident that the U.S. Senate is regarded as a great deliberative forum: With six years between elections, there is time to work through a problem — at least there should be.

Former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union because his pollster assured him that the public would support him, as they had voted by a large majority for Britain to remain in the European Economic Community, as it was then known, in 1975. Britain’s membership began in 1973.

A poll is a snapshot and reflects not only the feeling of the populace at the time but also the basis of what it thinks it believes or, in fact, does believe.

Cameron did not allow for campaigning and the emotional appeal of inflamed nationalism, plus some pretty hefty fibs from the current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his allies in the Brexit camp.

Had the EU membership issue been left to simmer, as it has simmered for decades, it might eventually have been decided by the elected representatives of the people in Parliament or just simmered on, either to dissipate or develop into an election issue at a later time.

But this has always been a particularly difficult issue for Parliament where the two main parties were split on it. Neither of them, Labor and Conservative, was wholly for Europe or against it. Successive Labor and Conservative governments have stayed firmly in Europe, although complaining all the way — as did Margaret Thatcher during her time as prime minister.

The EU referendum was an intrusion of direct government into the workings of parliamentary representative government — a referendum, not favored in Britain’s unwritten constitution, a sort of legal blithe spirit of practice, precedent, tradition and habit, trailing all the way back to the Magna Carta.

The constitution, long believed to gain its strength from its flexibility, now is flexed to a point of full crisis. Polls gave Cameron overconfidence in looking to a referendum to settle a nettlesome issue. It did, but not in the way Cameron and the polls predicted.

Polls are not going away. Recently I visited Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., home to the influential Quinnipiac Poll, where I conducted a television interview. Conclusion: Those pollsters know what they are doing, and they do it with science and without prejudice. Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, and his staff are employed by the university. The polling arm takes no outside funding, shielding the poll from allegations of political favoritism or manipulation.

It should be recognized by politicians that polls are only a snapshot, a second in time, of evolving public opinion. They do not handle complex issues well and referendums, which are polls taken to extreme, are unreasoning.

It can be argued, and I will not argue against you, that politicians now have abandoned thinking, reasoning and compromising in favor rigidities on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet politicians, in doing their jobs in session, remain a better way of deciding great issues than the whole populace in a committee of the whole.

Britain is in crisis not because it is a democracy, but because it tried something undemocratic and antithetical to its own traditions. The nation that ruled much of the world appears unable to rule itself.

It is coming as surely as cars changed the way we live, as airplanes revolutionized transportation and as the cellphone has conquered all.

It is the smart city of the future.

While it will look much like today’s cities, it will in fact be a digital construct; a place where sensors, interactivity and hyper-electronic speeds replace what will come to be seen as today’s leisurely pace of city operation and communication.

Imagine a place where police cruisers know the location of gunshots before anyone has called 911. Or, as Morgan O’Brien, chief executive officer of Anterix, a creator of private telephone networks for utilities, says, “By using broadband private networks, utilities can know a transmission wire has snapped before it hits the ground.”

Electric utilities, sometimes seen as wedded to the old ways of generation and distribution, have already laid the groundwork for cities’ electronic refurbishment. The first wave of the future, the smart meter, is in more than 60 percent of homes, and deployment continues apace.

The home smart meter does much more than simply record electricity use and ready a bill. It generates data on the local demand and flow patterns in the neighborhood. The smart meter has become vital in helping people save money when electricity prices are low (such as the middle of the night in many jurisdictions), but also helping to integrate the diverse new sources of generation from solar farms, solar panels on rooftops and wind turbines. Keeping tabs on this intermittent generation requires very smart electronics.

“Interconnectivity is the future,” says Clinton Vince, chairman of the U.S. Energy practice and co-chairman of the global energy sector at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. Basically, he points out, electric utilities must be very nimble to deal with the new microgrids and with individual generators using rooftop solar. The same applies to wind turbines, where the flow of electricity can be cut off instantly with a wind drop and other sources have to pick up seamlessly.

Chris Peoples, founding and managing partner of the Baltimore-based innovation strategy firm PP&A, says all this hyperactivity in the smart city will be recorded and preserved by blockchain, the ledger system of the 21st century.

To come are electric vehicles and autonomous ridesharing — so important that the big tech companies Cisco, Google, Uber and Amazon have invested in smart cities technologies, and have high hopes for growth there.

The smart city will want an even more reliable electric supply than we have today. Rapid response has been the modus operandi of electric companies down through the decades. Outages are handled with speed and big outages, such as after hurricanes, are dealt with by mobilizing restoration crews from unaffected areas.

But that may not be enough with greater reliance on electricity for things like autonomous vehicles and electric-powered delivery drones. These will have self-sufficiency through their batteries, but they also will need to have control systems that can operate in a blackout.

Anterix, for example, will provide secure broadband communications to utilities, enabling them to communicate when all other systems have failed.

There are two existential threats to the electric grid and, therefore, to the electricity-hungry smart city. One is cyberattack by enemies known and unknown. The other is a magnetic pulse, generated by an act of God in the form of solar flares, or an act of evil in the form of a nuclear weapon detonated overhead. Either way, the grid must be hardened, as far as science allows, against such eventualities.

I would submit that this amounts to a brave new world. But I would implore the designers to remember people also want simple things of their cities, like walkability and mobility.

If you get walkability you get livability and, yes, lovability. Think Paris, San Antonio and San Francisco. Get smart, smart city designers.

 

Photo: A JUMP on-demand electric bike in downtown San Antonio. JUMP Bikes is a dockless electric bicycle sharing system acquired by Uber – San Antonio, Texas, USA

Labor Day is almost here and with it another blessed, three-day weekend. Three days without work!

The best day, of course, is the middle one, when we can luxuriate in the time off without the knowledge that grips most of us on Sunday afternoons — that we must climb Monday’s escarpment.

The fact is that we Americans work too much. Not necessarily too hard, but too much. In the United States, workers’ vacations are mostly two precious weeks — and a third after long service. In Europe, they’re a month or, as in Germany, often up to six weeks — yet no one accuses the Germans of being idlers or not performing.

We won’t get more vacations, I think, until high-tech workers — those one might refer to as “the indispensables” — demand and get them. Some already have the choice of working in Europe and are looking at the “package” of their employment, not just the dollars in the paycheck. If they demand more, the idea will get around.

However, more vacation days won’t have the same benefit as those leisurely Sundays in a three-day weekend.

There is a way to greater leisure with the same number of work hours in a week. I have experienced it, and it does wonders in terms of employee happiness and creativity.

In the early 1960s, I was a writer for BBC Television News, and we worked a fabulous shift system: three days on and three days off. This system recognized that journalists could seldom finish what they had started in a procrustean eight hours.

The BBC 10-hour shift — three days on and three days off — accepted and accommodated the reality of the work rather than trying to squeeze the work into an arbitrary time frame, leaving it either unfinished or for someone else to try to finish — say a script for the late news broadcast or coverage of an ongoing parliamentary debate.

The social dimension of this work structure was even more interesting. Writers and editors became more productive in other ways: Some wrote novels, others worked on biographies or tried their hands at plays. They’d been given the gift of time.

Armed with this experience, when I worked at the Washington Post, where I was an assistant editor and also president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, one of the largest chapters of the American Newspaper Guild, the trade union that represented journalists and some other workers, I was appalled at the mess the Post had with its overtime.

There was a complicated system of overtime and something called “overtime cutoff,” which applied to people who were paid more than the Guild-negotiated salary. It led to fights, conscientious reporters and editors working overtime without compensation, and major altercations over weekend schedules. No winners, just unhappy people. The management knew it was a mess and would’ve liked to change it.

When I suggested the BBC system to the Washington Post Company, management was enthusiastic. They asked if the union would bring it forward as a formal proposal in the contract negotiations, then just beginning for a new three-year contract.

We had to have our proposal vetted by union headquarters, the International. They said, “No, no, no. Heresy.” The union had always fought for a shorter workday since the so-called “model contract,” written by Heywood Broun, the famous reporter, columnist and founder of the American Newspaper Guild, in 1935. It was dropped like a libelous story.

Well, the three-days shift won’t work in many places, but in journalism, manufacturing and retail, it’s worth a try. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers would have the joy of that middle day of rest and, maybe, creativity.

When you open another cold one on Sept. 1, think about how nice it would be if that happened all year. Three days on and three days off. Glorious!

The serenity prayer, often called the alcoholics’ prayer, states, “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

These thoughts might well be applied to the contentious and, at times, grim business of immigration.

You don’t have to be a political scientist to see that the immigration system is broken. Worse, it won’t be fixed soon.

In the absence of an immigration policy, the de facto policy is more of what doesn’t work — more cruel deportations and more desperate people seeking the simplest of human needs: safety and the ability to provide for themselves and their families.

A recent ICE raid on seven poultry plants in Mississippi tells the immigration story: People who are doing work Americans don’t want to do are rounded up at incalculable human cost.

Families are ripped asunder; the fathers are to be shipped to places they scarcely know and where there is nothing for them except penury and likely violent death. One man is headed for Guatemala after 18 years in the United States. He leaves behind his children who are, by birthright, citizens.

Poultry production is hurt, affecting the whole supply chain from farm to table.

President Trump has said raids like the one in Mississippi are a deterrent to illegal immigration. Were public hangings a deterrent to murder?

Desperate people do desperate things. Illegal immigration is a crime — a crime that has no statute of limitations. But it is a crime based on a fundamentally noble human aspiration: to be safe and to work.

Ideas about an open border are, at this period in history, insane. That would lead to a kind of conquest by stealth.

What to do?

First, decide what can be done and what might get through Congress.

A starting place: the status for the 11 million living in the shadows. They are the clue to ending the horror of deportation, which has done nothing to stem the tide of migrants — whether the deportations were conducted during the Obama administration or this one.

Neither deportation nor citizenship is an answer. This phantom population needs to be stabilized and brought into the light. The working illegals provide labor where it is needed for American prosperity and, as they send expatriate earnings to their homelands, helps those countries from slipping further into chaos.

Next, the extreme voices of the left and the right need to be quieted.

People who are here and have roots here need to be recognized as the flotsam of broken countries, not persecuted as criminals. Pro-immigrant groups, with their insistence that any solution must contain a “path to citizenship,” don’t help. A right to work and live in peace should be victory enough. That requires a regime of work permits related to what the British call “right of abode.”

I have been drawn to, and written about, the work of a Malibu, Calif.-based outfit called the Immigration Tax Inquiry Group (ITIG) because it seems that organization has a plan that would work, normalizing life for those who are here, ending the savagery of families torn asunder by men with guns raiding at dawn.

The ITIG, the work largely of one man, Mark Jason, a former IRS special agent, aims to provide a 10-year work permit but with a twist. The twist is that the permit recognizes the special nature and special burden of migration and accesses a 5  percent tax on both the employer and worker’s wages. These tax revenues, hundreds of billions over time, according to Jason, should then go to helping those communities with high immigrant populations pay for schools, health care, policing and other services.

In medicine, doctors seek to stabilize the patient before all else. Immigration is in chaos: people desperate to get in, people desperate when they’re thrown out. It may be the law, but it also is state-sponsored cruelty.

We can stop the deportations with a simple work permit; end much suffering as we head haltingly toward a more complete policy.

If we can’t fix the entire immigration dilemma, then let’s have the courage to change what we can and stop the shame of tearing up families.

In the ’70s and ’80s, black was gold. Coal was king.

Coal in tandem with nuclear were to be the white knights of the United States, as we struggled with the Arab oil embargo, price-gouging by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and declining oil production at home.

In 1977, the fledgling Department of Energy declared natural gas a “depleted” resource. Today, it battles with solar for cost advantage. The technology of fracking changed everything. Never forget technology’s possible revolutionary impact.

Solar and wind — today’s energy darlings — were struggling as the National Laboratories sought to make them workable. Solar was thought to have its future in mirrors concentrating heat on “power towers.” Wind was regarded with skepticism; even the shape of the towers and blades was in flux.

Everything that moved would be electrified. Nuclear would be used to make electricity. Coal would be burned as a utility and industrial fuel, and it would be gasified and liquified for transportation and other uses.

Environmentalists were pushing coal as an alternative to nuclear, which they were convinced was dangerous: In the United States it has cost no lives, but gas and oil in various ways have taken their toll.

Coal and nuclear were bright stars in a dark sky.

In 1974, at the White House, Donald Rice, who later ran the Rand Corporation, speculated in an interview with me on whether there might be oil and gas in the Southern Hemisphere, then considered unlikely and now, with production in South America and South Africa, a game-changer. Beware of the conventional wisdom.

All of this came flooding back at an extraordinary summit on global energy horizons convened in Washington recently by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm with offices in 79 countries. By pulling in lawyers from Uzbekistan to London, Dentons’ summit was able to fit America’s energy transformation into the global reality.

Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, laid out a picture that is sobering. He said that by 2040, the world would be pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than today, notwithstanding dramatic actions to curb burning fossil fuels in North America, Europe and China. The problem is the growth in demand for electricity in what is being called the “Global East,” where new coal plants are coming online in China, India and Indonesia among other countries. This despite all deploying solar and wind, and India and China having aggressive nuclear growth plans. The electricity need in the region is great and fuel solution is fossil, mostly coal.

Enter Ernest Moniz. The former secretary of energy who now heads his own think tank, Energy Futures Initiative, is a passionate backer of carbon capture use and storage. Moniz, also an adviser to Dentons, is laying out a whole scenario of “carbon capture from air” that is persuasive. It is part of his newly unveiled “Green Real Deal.”

Having chaired two carbon capture conferences, I have wondered why the technology, which gets more sophisticated all the time, has not been embraced by coal producers with vigor. They have been cooler than the utilities who somewhat favor the technology.

Clinton Vince, chair of Dentons’ U.S. Energy practice and co-chair of the firm’s global Energy sector, reminded the summit of the global importance of nuclear, now shunned in the United States for cost reasons. He sees nuclear as vital to climate goals around the world.

Unlike the ’70s and early ’80s, there is no shortage of energy. The challenges are in how clean it can get; how it can be stored, if it is electricity; and how fast technology can change the energy equation — as it has over the last four decades — to save the climate without restricting economic growth.

The commodity that is in truly short supply is time.

The Democrats on the left of the party, exemplified by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, are running away with the health care debate.

The problem for those who, like myself, want to see health care extended and rationalized is that the real goals of reform have been abandoned for “universal health care” as an ideological and political goal; add a political prejudice against corporations and the idea of the most health care for all of the people gets lost, as it did  in the debates.

There should be only two goals in health care reform: bring down the cost and see that everyone is covered.

We in the United States have the costliest medicine on earth. We also have the spottiest and most risible coverage. We spend over 18 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on health care, nearly twice the cost of health care in other advanced countries like Britain, France, Germany and Holland. That is a huge cost, making us a less-competitive country. It comes not from medicine but rather from inefficient management.

We are a nation that venerates its business culture, but in health care, as it stands, we are protecting inefficiency as though it were a system. There are better ways, short of upending the whole structure, as Warren, Sanders and Harris would like to do, of fixing the system.

Serious reform is seriously needed.

Children’s National Hospital in Washington, for example, I am told, employs 150 people just to deal with the insurance companies, negotiating payments, securing permission for procedures and protesting disallowances. Presumably, there are as many people in the insurance companies on the other side of these transactions.

None of this huge personnel deployment is delivering health care or serving medicine. They are engaged in health care’s equivalent of a souk — bargaining care for money. It should change because it is enormously wasteful, let alone because it fails in its mission: delivering care to the sick.

Remember the old military saw: We had to destroy the town to save it.

In full bay at the Democratic debates in Detroit, Warren, Sanders and Harris were in competition both to junk all private health insurance and to trash the companies that provide it.

I have spent three decades studying health care delivery. While I am an unalloyed admirer of the National Health System in the United Kingdom, it is not for the United States. Not now.

I know the NHS: It has treated my family well since its inception and, briefly, myself. But I do not think we can trash what we have here root and branch and install a duplicate NHS. We have too much that would have to be changed; too large a new bureaucracy would have to be created.

I am in favor, though, of the government as a payer of last resort for those who cannot get coverage and those for whom treatment is too expensive for the insurer.

We need to regulate medicine and to take the uncertainty out of it. That uncertainty extends from patients who never know when they will be sideswiped by an out-of-network procedure and routine providers, to the hospitals that need to know what they will be paid. Coverage should be guaranteed, not negotiated.

I used to own a newsletter publishing and conference company in Washington. I provided health insurance, which cost me in well-being as well as dollars. The costs went up relentlessly and coverage was problematic. My top aide came down with a rare cancer. The treatment was fine, all paid for, but the post-treatment painkillers were not allowed. I tried to persuade the insurer — after all, we were a 20-strong group. They would not be moved. So my aide, who is French, had her sister send the medications from France, where she could get them for free as a citizen.

If we can get the horror of negotiation out of the system, care would be better, and costs would fall.

I am told the future might be based on what already is working well with Kaiser Permanente, an integrated managed care consortium that insures, provides doctors and hospitals in the package.

It is worth a look — before we start shelling the system to save it.

I, a serial supporter of minority causes, am fed up with the race card. Calling someone a racist is sliming’s cheap shot. It is a banal accusation that cannot be justified and cannot be defended against. It implies the moral deficiency of those who are accused of it.

I am not abandoning my abhorrence of people held down, held back or shuffled through a justice mill because they are of a different race or ethnicity.

Believe me, I have seen it. I have seen a bartender in Baltimore refusing to serve a black man but telling him he could take a bottle home. I have worked at a newspaper where it was debated whether a black editor could manage white editors. I have covered courts where young black offenders are marched through trials that are no more than sentencing mills; where hire-by-the-trial lawyers plead away young minority people who do not know what is happening to them besides that they are going to jail. I have seen segregated water fountains, park benches and restrooms.

Yes, I have seen it.

In South Africa during apartheid, I saw a policeman leading a prisoner with a wire tether around his neck, as you would walk a dog. In Zimbabwe, I saw then-President Robert Mugabe become obsessed with demeaning and forcing out the white population.

I heard the language of apartheid on the West Bank, where there are struggles over land. I heard a Malaysian publisher say demeaning things about the Chinese. I know of the oppression of minorities from Vietnam to those of Korean descent

who perforce live second-class lives in Japan.

I have seen how the Catholics were treated in Northern Ireland and how both sides killed each other randomly. It starts with insults and ends with bloodshed.

I have toured Auschwitz where racism was perfected into genocide and evil wrought its masterpiece.

Race-baiting, race oppression and race categorization are among the deep and pervasive threats to society and to a civil way of life.

But that does not justify the easy and destructive branding of almost anyone who disagrees with anyone else as a racist. That is cheap, shallow, damning and, as a negative, hard to disprove.

I have been there, too, and know the humiliation and impotence of being accused of something you cannot defend yourself against.

Years ago, I was going to be appointed to a vacancy on the board of the venerable National Press Club in Washington, when one board member received an anonymous phone call saying that I said racist things. I did not and I do not, but the board thought it better not to appoint me. It hurt then, decades ago, and it hurts now.

Who wants to say, “Some of my best friends are minorities” or signal their virtue to disprove the label “racist”? Like a wall poster, it is easy to put up and hard to take down.

It is time we took the race card, burned it and interred its ashes. The epithet “racist” — which can be attached as easily as sticking on a Post-it — is neither dialogue nor disputation. Worse, its careless use is turning people against people whose views they fundamentally support.

While it is in play, the race card can be produced from the political sleeve like a wild card to slime anyone who disagrees with its player.

I know House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has worked for decades for civil rights causes. Using the race card was woeful in its dishonesty.

By the same token, I believe President Donald Trump to be, in many things, a truly reprehensible man; a disgrace at many levels. But that is not a reason to use the race card. Calling someone a racist precludes bringing in the heavy artillery of facts to blow away real bigotry. In its way, it locks in prejudice.

The president standing toe to toe with four Democratic House novices of color — the Squad — shouting “racist” is not speech. It is a refuge for the verbally bankrupt. Sadly, by calling Trump a racist, the Squad fired the first fusillade.