Looking into my beautiful newborn’s eyes, it seems impossible to put a dollar figure on this precious little girl.

But what seems impossible for me is no problem for Ochsner Clinic Foundation.

$13,674.60. That was amount presented to me and my wife in the aftermath of the miracle of childbirth. Thank God Loyola provides its faculty and staff with world-class health care coverage, because our final bill came to only the slightest fraction of that eye-popping amount.

But that we had insurance to shield us from this astronomical bill is irrelevant. What concerns me is the 47 million people who the U.S. Census Bureau estimates have no insurance whatsoever. For those who struggle with the math, that is nearly 16 percent of the nation.

I have to think about what would happen if we weren’t among the lucky ones, and if we didn’t have the luxury of a good employee-sponsored health plan.

I have friends and even relatives who find themselves in this very situation. They are working hard – some even holding down two jobs – just to make a living. They make too much money to qualify for Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. They are also too young for Medicare, and their employers can’t afford to offer them subsidized coverage.

But even the ones who have insurance aren’t safe. Many of the so-called policies my friends get through their employers are so desiccated from years of cutbacks that they would still face bills in the thousands of dollars following a hospital stay.

I can’t blame Ochsner or any health care provider for this. I can’t even blame the insurance companies for this mess. They are just the players.

It’s the game I hate. The game is the market-based health care system.

With all due respect to my esteemed colleagues in the College of Business, the market is just the wrong model for a health care system.

Markets are great for a lot of things. They are the best answer if you want to make lots of money. They are a terrific answer if you want to drive innovation. They are wonderful if you want to predict the likelihood of an event, like they do with prediction-oriented derivative markets that place bets on things like where a hurricane will strike.

But markets have one key flaw – they have no conscience. And don’t try to feed me any of that “invisible hand” nonsense.

Markets don’t necessarily do what is right or what is just. They do what makes the most profit. And for many scenarios, that’s OK. But for health care, we need a system that operates on the principle of doing the right thing.

Could you imagine if the police or the fire department operated as a market? “I’m sorry sir, I know your house is on fire, but I can’t help you. You don’t subscribe to our fire services.” Or how about, “Well, it sure is a shame that you are being held up. I would love to help, but you aren’t on our protected citizens’ list.”

We would never stand for that, and we shouldn’t when it comes to health care.

For a market to work properly, you have to have choice. You have to be able to opt out of one option and choose another based on the best information available.

But that is not what we have. Our choice, as presented, is to accept our employer’s plan, however limited, if it’s available at all. Or, we can buy insurance on our own through the one or two insurers that offer individual coverage at an astronomical price. Or we can opt out of insurance altogether and hope nothing catastrophic happens.

That’s not a choice. It is a recipe for bankruptcy. Rather than trying to shove the square peg of health care into the round hole of the market, we need to realize a public solution may well be the best option.

There are just some things best handled in common. People came together so many thousands of years ago and formed societies to solve problems that were bigger than any individual person.

We realized no one person could build an effective transportation system. Instead, communities came together, and everyone reaped the benefits. No one person could protect the village from gangs of bandits. Instead, communities put together militias to provide for the common protection of all.

And now, it’s past time to again band together and protect our community. This time, it’s a health care crisis we need to tackle. Let’s band together and come up with a way to offer the protection of health care coverage for everyone.

Michael Giusti is the adviser for The Maroon and a professor in the School of Mass Communication.