Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, October 24, 2005.

Anvils are funny. They're hunks of solid metal that land on people (or coyotes) and crush them. Or if somebody steps off a building ledge, you hand them an anvil to help gravity take effect. Right? Everybody knows this. How do we know this? From cartoons, of course. In the same way most our knowledge of explosives, catapults, and opera has been formed, we know anvils through cartoons.

This has very little to do with their original purpose. Anvils are actually used by blacksmiths as a base on which to hammer hot metal into shape. (By the way, a hammer to the head or hot metal branding some buns can be very funny, too.) There are blacksmiths today, but they certainly aren't the first thing that leaps to mind when you see a giant anvil falling out of the sky. Our shared understanding is a bit off, which works nicely for comics.

In the case of health care, our shared but warped understanding doesn't work so nicely. In America, we all understand that our employers should provide us with health care. We were brought up that way. And it made sense back when American companies were the big dogs in manufacturing and they only had to compete with each other. They could afford to provide medical benefits as a controllable cost. But now, the reality is that the costs are not controllable; it's a global economy, American manufacturers compete with everybody, and medical care providers -- from pharmaceuticals to HMOs -- don't seem to have much incentive to charge less.

Now imagine that I continue on with this thought, but go into excruciating detail. I sit behind an impressive desk wearing authoritative glasses plodding through charts with various statistics and graphs and -- WHAM! -- an anvil lands on my head, sits there for a moment, and then tips off as an enormous lump rises up. Then I shatter into a million pieces.

Anvils are funny. And they get you out having to fully explain weak analogies....