As I chatted recently with a cardiologist and an internist, both retired, we found ourselves in agreement that the sage of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the late Dr. Tinsley Harrison, knew how best to solve the health-care crisis.

His solution in a small 1974 book is so elegantly simple, so perfectly logical, that it wouldn’t stand a chance of passing in Congress because … it messes with human nature. Those who have wealth and power will not give it up voluntarily.

Dr. Harrison would have distinguished members of the medical profession, deans of great medical schools, informed congressional leaders and cabinet officers put together legislation the president would then present to Congress.

If they could work in committees as grand juries do, protected from the opinionated surges of cable “news” and the pestilent swarm of lobbyists, a plenary session could produce a workable bill in a timely session.

Imagine auditing those sessions; you’d hear nothing that is heard from congressmen and commentators on TV. You’d hear distinguished doctors designing a system to prevent and treat illness in a safe, affordable way. No party or ideology would distract their focus on a singular concern — patients.

Look in on the scene when their work is done and, all in suits, skirts and white coats, sit in semicircles on the Rose Garden lawn as their chairman presents the president the product of our best, unfettered minds.

Surely legislation so conceived and designed is destined to pass.

Wouldn’t work; the insurance companies and their allies in Congress would kill the bill. Insurance companies have proved more powerful than every popularly elected president who tried to give all Americans good health care.

From Teddy Roosevelt on, Republican and Democratic presidents have tried and failed to pass the kind of universal care that every other advanced nation on earth provides for its people.

Republicans in Congress are united in their desire to keep the record of failure unbroken. So implacable are they in opposition that I doubt they would back legislation proposed by a Republican, Richard Nixon.

In 1971, he addressed these words to Congress:

“For a growing number of Americans, the cost of care is becoming prohibitive. And even those who can afford most care may find themselves impoverished by a catastrophic medical expenditure … Things do not have to be this way. We can change these conditions — indeed, we must change them if we are to fulfill our promise as a nation. Good health care should be readily available to all of our citizens.”

Nixon proposed a national health strategy that would have required all employers to provide employees coverage with minimum benefit standards, created subsidies for low- and middle-income families, established caps on cost-sharing for families, built state exchanges or pools for those ineligible for Medicaid or employer plans, and instituted cost-containment measures.

In today’s climate, Nixon’s proposal would have been heresy, grounds for banishing him from the party. In a policy sense, he and his benefactor, President Eisenhower, led a split but on the whole more reasonable party.

As it turned out, liberals personified by a young, slender-faced Ted Kennedy insisted on a public option, a classic case of the perfect defeating the good. Of course, all thoughts of health care were swept away in the whirlwind of Watergate and the vote to impeach the president.

But the point is that even a Republican president’s ideas of health reform are anathema to today’s party. As The New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote last week, the space between the parties isn’t ideological but galactic; they live on different universes.

In the years since Nixon’s proposal and liberals’ killer opposition, the cost of health care has gone up, up, up from seven percent of the gross national product back then to 16 percent now, and rising.

In that time, the number of uninsured has risen from 25 million to estimates ranging from 30 million to 50 million. Congress has passed two slightly different versions of health-care reform to cover almost all of them.

One of my in-laws is a very distinguished cardiologist, dean of three prestigious medical schools. He could have chaired Tinsley Harrison’s dream conference of health care planned by our best minds and purist souls.

He is critical of many features of the two bills, but he is first a caregiver. He is focused on the 30 million to 50 million, many of them working poor, who face the panic of a sick child or catastrophic illness and no insurance.

That is where the president’s focus seems to be, and he has finally given up on convincing Republicans. They are the party, which, all but one, opposed the original Social Security bill, saying then as now it will wreck the nation.

Social Security didn’t imperil America and the president’s bill won’t either. He now can talk about health care in real terms, not the way the Republicans defined it.

He is likely to get it passed by a simple majority through the reconciliation process, the same parliamentary device Republicans used for the Bush tax cuts, a transit point in the massive transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to the wealthy. When fat cats need fattening, a way can always be found.

It’s too bad it has to be this way, but as my doctor friends and I concluded, when the best minds and motives of the private sector can’t or won’t come together and do the right thing, then the government has to step in.

So take your choice: Is health care to be governed by the insurance companies or the government? And consider this: has any insurance company ever been voted out of office?

H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co.