If they asked a bunch of doctors how anesthesia worked, they were just about to go perform surgery at home, you'd expect the doctors to warn that it was a bad idea, no?
"A is to B as X is to Y", compares A and X, not A and B. It puts A in the context of B, as X is in the context of Y.
the comparison is between "how does anaesthesia work?" (A) and "how does auth work?" (X), relative to "about to perform surgery at home" (B) and "about to implement a service containing medical information" (Y).
The point is: he's about to do something big, and is asking a basic question. The real problem is not the basic question (auth) but the context he's doing it in.
If a nurse in training, in a classroom setting, asked about anaesthesia, it'd be fine. If they're a doctor, about to operate on a live patient, it's different.