Oh, that’ll help lower medical costs.

Of course, none of these lawmakers are offering to risk their own, personal capital buying stock in these hospitals, which would give them some legal authority to suggest management changes -- while also putting them at personal risk of losing some of that investment, should their politically expedient cost-shifting demands prove inefficient, costly, or counterproductive.

No, it’s so much more fun to simply tell medical professionals how to do their jobs, without bothering to go through tedious years of study, earning a degree in medicine or even in hospital management. And it’s certainly more fun if you don’t stand to lose any of your personal nest-egg should your new rules turn out to have high compliance costs, while doing more harm than good.

Voting largely along party lines, the Democrat-dominated Assembly Tuesday backed Assembly Bill 322, which would require hospitals to provide charity care. (Put another way, since private hospitals still have to show a profit, this bill would require them to shift the burden of medical costs run up by illegal aliens and those who fail to work and save for a rainy day, onto the backs of those of us who work and save and are willing and able to pay our bills.)

Also moving forward was Assembly Bill 342, which requires hospitals to inform the state where they send their profits. (Sounds innocuous enough. But if they can do it to hospitals, how long will it be before they impose similar requirements on your home-based business?)

The list goes on. Assembly Bill 296 would limit what hospitals can charge for emergency room care -- again, read that to mean “punishes those who take care of their health and schedule their hospital use ahead of time, by requiring the hospitals to charge us more in order to subsidize the astronomical costs run up by those who use the emergency rooms as their ‘family doctor.’ ”

Also OK’d by the 26-16 Democratic majority in the lower house was a bill requiring pharmaceutical companies to report to the attorney general their gifts to doctors and pharmacists.

The target here, obviously, is the way these firms ply “care deliverers” with inducements to prescribe or recommend their costly patented nostrums.

The underlying solution would be to eliminate the middlemen by allowing consumers to buy more (“all” would be better) of these formulations “over the counter,” or to reduce drug development costs by simplifying FDA approval hurdles. But the Legislature of course shows no taste for such systemic reform -- some of which would require authorizing 10th-Amendment lawsuits at the Supreme Court to restore states’ rights in these areas, where the Constitution authorizes no federal meddling, in the first place.

Instead, the notion is that doctors and drug companies will somehow be “embarrassed” if only they can be forced to reveal the perfectly legal stuff they’re doing.

And why does the Assembly majority believe we need all this new meddling in an already heavily regulated business?

“Eighty percent of the hospitals in Southern Nevada are controlled by out-of-state corporations,” shrieks Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno.

Good heavens. Wait till she finds out what percentage of Nevada gasoline brands and fast-food franchises are controlled by “out-of-state corporations.” Any chance the Democrats can require McDonald’s and Wendy’s to use 4 percent of their receipts to give out free burgers to those of us who regularly come up a little short, just before payday?

“We are mandating hospitals have to have a plan to give away 4 percent of their gross,” came the sensible response from outvoted Assembly Minority Leader Lynn Hettrick, R-Gardnerville. “That doesn’t mean they have 4 percent profits. That bothers us. There is no concern about the costs or what they already give away.”

Ms. Leslie concedes the future of these heavy-handed pieces of micro-management may be dim in the GOP-controlled state Senate.

Thank goodness.

Yes, costs are daunting all across the spectrum of the “medical services” industry. But the only long-term solution is to back off much existing government regulation -- “all” (save the ability to prosecute for endangerment) would be better -- allowing competition in the free market to work its price-cutting magic.

To instead impose a bigger government paperwork burden is like hoping to make the pack mules move faster by piling on another bag of rocks.