The Obama Administration is bent on taking over healthcare in this country, and as Jennifer has pointed out, it is by no means above making claims that it will save money by doing so. How turning 17 percent of the American economy over to those wonderful folks who brought you Medicare is going to save money is a mystery to me.

I recently became eligible for Medicare and went online to sign up. Being logical by nature, I went to www.medicare.gov . No matter where I went on that website, however, I could not find how to sign up and was constantly asked for my Medicare number. Of course, not having yet signed up, I didn’t have one. I finally called Medicare and, having battled my way through the now-inevitable phone tree, at last got a live human being.

It turns out that you don’t sign up for Medicare by going to Medicare — silly me for thinking so. You sign up for Medicare by going to Social Security. (If you want to join the Army, do you call the Department of Agriculture?) I’m sure there is some reason for this that is bureaucratically logical, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron. But is it beyond the capacity of Medicare to put a prominent note on the opening page of its website saying, “If you want to sign up for Medicare, go here” and provide a link? Apparently it is.

All of this brought to mind a column I wrote for American Heritage a few years ago on the takeover of the phone system by the Wilson Administration. The “progressives” of that era thought that because AT&T was a monopoly, the phone system would be better and more cheaply run by the Post Office (no snickering, please). The idea was politically marketed under the name “postalization.”

Theodore Vail, the brilliant president of AT&T, cheerfully admitted that the company was, in large measure, a monopoly. But he noted that, “all monopolies should be regulated. Government ownership would be an unregulated monopoly.”

He was, of course, entirely correct. While a major reason for taking over the phone system had been to make lower rates possible, almost the very first thing the Post Office did was to raise rates, and sharply. AT&T, as a regulated utility, had had to obtain permission to raise rates. The government could just do so, and did. The Post Office also imposed a new service-connection fee.

The whole experiment lasted only slightly over a year, as public support evaporated in the face of the government’s high-handed ways and the phone system was returned to private hands. Thus the United States continued to have the best and cheapest phone system in the world for the next sixty years, until technological advances made the AT&T monopoly no longer necessary. Once AT&T was broken up, market competition quickly lowered prices dramatically.

Perhaps those who regard the nationalization of healthcare as a looming economic disaster — count me among them — need to come up with a word to describe what the Obama Administration has in mind, a word both accurate and scary.

How about “medicarization”?