Gen's first published novel, Noble Vision, is a medical thriller based on the very kind of government oppression of doctors which Ayn Rand predicted and now exists. Please read the description of her book and this excerpt.Posted on 05/05/2005 12:08:19 PM PDT by Hank Kerchief
Students of Objectivism frequently note the number of things Ayn Rand predicted about society, culture, and the world which have actually happened just as she predicted. It is not what she wanted. She hoped her predictions would not come true, that her writing would serve as a warning that would stop the growth of the anti-intellectualism, altruism, and collectivism that is slowly eating away at western culture and civilization, creating the very horrors she predicted.
Then Doctors
In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in the chapter, "Is Atlas Shrugging?" Ayn Rand identified the second class of individuals, after businessmen, who would be the victims of the altruist-collectivist corruption of enlightenment civilization.
| "Businessmen—who provide us with the means of livelihood, with jobs, with labor-saving devices, with modern comforts, with an ever-rising standard of living—are the men most immediately and urgently needed by society. They have been the first victims, the hated, smeared, denounced, exploited scapegoats of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis. Doctors come next; it is precisely because their services are so crucially important and so desperately needed that the doctors are now the targets of the altruists' attack, on a worldwide scale." [Emphasis added.]
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Most people, even most doctors, are not aware of the extent of oppression today's Doctors work under or the degree of deterioration our medical services have suffered. In most "advanced" countries of the world, medicine is, "socialized," which means medical "services" are payed for with state funds and, therefore, medical practices are regulated by the state. What this means is eloquently described in these paragraphs from the Leonard Peikoff piece from the June, 1962 The Objectivist Newsletter, special supplement, "Doctors And The Police State."
| "In a free society, a man cannot force his terms on others; those who dissent are free to deal elsewhere. A patient who disapproves of a doctor's methods of treatment can seek out another doctor; a doctor who considers a patient's demands irrational is not compelled to give in to them. And, in the long run, it is the best and ablest doctors—those who achieve the cures and demonstrate their value—that rise to the top and set the example for the rest of the profession. "But when the government sets the terms, they are enforced by the police power of the State. The standards of the government become the laws of the country, and no others are legally permitted. Should any doctor object to the decrees of the officials who staff the State Health Board—should he attempt to act on his own best judgment and make an unauthorized use of the drugs, the hospital beds, the operating rooms being paid for by the State—he becomes thereby a criminal, and he is legally subject to retribution: to loss of license, or fine, or jail-sentence. There is no one to whom he can turn: the government is his sole employer. He either submits—or he leaves medicine—or he escapes from the country. The proposal to pay medical expenses with State funds has only one meaning: it is a proposal to enslave the doctors." [Emphasis added.]
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Doctors and Freedom
In my article, I quoted briefly the reasons various ficticious "strikers" in Atlas Shrugged gave for quitting the system that was destroying them. One of them was Dr. Hendricks who quit for the same reason many of the best and brightest doctors today are quitting. This is the complete statement of Ayn Rand's Dr. Hendricks:
| "I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago," said Dr. Hendricks. "Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. "I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.' That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? "Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't."
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When depicted in Ayn Rand's fiction, government control of medicine, the decline of medical services, and the loss of the best minds of ability from the field were already beginning.What was only fiction and only beginning when she wrote it, today has become a full blown horrible fact.
It Only Grows Worse
As an example of the degree to which the government attempts to completely control every aspect of every individual's medical life, See the Latest Ron Paul article, Dietary Supplements and Health Freedom
Most of us have had our own experiences with the deteriorating medical services in this country. Here are some current links to stories that show we are well on our way to the complete destruction of the greatest Medical system in the world.
(G. Stolyarov II)
Why Health Care Reform May Be Bad for Your Health (Richard A. Epstein)
Comparable Worth for Doctors: A Severe Case of Government Malpractice (Robert E. Moffit, Ph.D.)
An excerpt: "This system of price controls on physician care for the elderly will mean many doctors who feel the fees for their services are not adequate will refuse to accept Medicare patients. This will likely lead to less available care for many senior citizens. Worse, advocates of the new Medicare fee system want to impose it on the entire American health care delivery system. Just like any system of price controls, this will generate shortages in the quantity and quality of medicine for all Americans."
Health Care Reform: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Michael Tanner)
How Medical Boards Nationalized Health Care (Henry E. Jones)
When You Won’t Be Able to Find a Physician (Gary North)
A Medical Thriller
Ayn Rand warned us about what would happen in the field of medicine. It was her fiction that appealed to the wide audience that made her philosophy and astonishing predictions known. Readers and fans of Ayn Rand frequently complain that since Rand, there has been little or no quality fiction written with the values and insights they enjoyed in Rand's fiction.
Until now, that has been true, but there is a new writer that I can recommend, without reservation, to all those who ever enjoyed Rand, and anyone who enjoys reading well plotted, well written, fiction. That writer is Gen LaGreca.
Gen's first published novel, Noble Vision, is a medical thriller based on the very kind of government oppression of doctors which Ayn Rand predicted and now exists. Please read the description of her book and this excerpt.
I'm glad I read it when I was 18, before college.
I respectfully disagree.
It was the Medicare act.
ping
My dad was an OB-GYN who practiced from 1945-1978 in central California. His patients for the first 20 years were lower-middle-income ladies married to blue-collar husbands who worked hard to support their families so that their wives could stay home with the children.
In the 1960s, that began to change. Dad began to see pregnant, unmarried, unemployed high-school dropouts on welfare in the waiting room. They often abused drugs, and ignored his warnings about what this could do to their unborn children. They viewed having babies as certification of their adulthood, but felt no obligation--indeed, seemed to have no concept of what was needed--to raise their children responsibly, or to behave with responsibility themselves. They were paid generously by the state to keep having babies, and so had no motivation to do more difficult things like finish high school, develop employment skills, or get married, which would have resulted in a reduction of government handouts.
Careless of their own and their babies' health, they began to have problems during delivery and their babies began to be born with drug addictions or damage. They sued my dad, the hospital, anyone they could find to blame for the results of their own irresponsible behavior. Dad, who had never been sued before, was sued twice in 1975. Though he was acquitted in both cases, his malpractice insurance went from $6,000 to $36,000 in 1976. To cover part of the cost, he raised his pre-natal, delivery, and post-natal care fee from $300 to $900, and stopped writing off part of the fee for his poorer, paying patients. (Medi-Cal, California's medical welfare program, paid $140 per patient at that time.) His fellow OBs began to refuse to accept new patients; many gave up the OB side of their practices altogether.
After a third lawsuit in 1978, Dad retired at only 62 years old, leaving the work he had loved. Many of his paying patients wrote letters begging him to reconsider, since they liked and trusted him and knew they'd have trouble finding a new obstetrician. He and his responsible patients paid the price of the system imposed by the government and the welfare queens it created.
Any time I hear someone complain about greedy doctors, I make her listen to this whole story. And I thank any doctor who treats me, and express sympathy for what I know he's going through.
pinging all over
check back later, looks interesting.
The controlled substance laws are what got everybody used to the idea that the Federal government was in charge of medicine.
Without the controlled substance laws, Medicare would be nothing more than a dusty gleam in Lyndon Johnson's dessicated eyes.
Hey you found us out.
Can you protect yourself from the other people's knowledge? If you misdiagnose yourself, not only are you likely to die (a just punishment in this case), but you are likely to take many others with you (not necessarily justly.) For example, can an oilwell worker from Angola diagnose himself well enough to go to London?
I'm not talking about government protecting me from me. I take an antibiotic, stop using it early because I feel better, and then resistant bacteria develops that ends up infecting and killing you. That's the kind of problem I'm talking about.
Because of the nature of infectious disease, whether you get sick or not has nothing to do with what kind of pharmacy you patronize, and everything to do with the random event of you and I being in close proximity at the wrong time.
I don't think prescriptions should be required for most medicines (it irritates me no end that I have to get them for my insulin), but antibiotics and other medicines that may create resistance in infectious microbes are different, it seems to me.
The axiom of "If you want more of something subsidize it, if you want less of something you tax it". The government wanted more unemployed teenagers pregnant so they subsidized it. Sure enough you see what happened.Then take buisnesses. Lawyers can run whole buisnesses/doctors out of town even though they have done no wrong and are exonerated, they still pay a heavy price.
Yeah he made such a bad living off mediccine he retired at 62. Ohh the humanity. I think I am going to cry.
This type of discussion always degenerates into the most spurious and silly arguments. Of course the government has a security interest in stopping the spread of communicable diseases. That interst is not the motivator in the discussion we are having. Now we could define all sickness as as security interest and eliminate all freedoms with regard to medicine, oh wait, we have already done something similar to that.
I had the exact same reaction when I read "Atlas Shrugged" a year ago.
I found the antidote to "enraged."
"Restoring the Lost Constitution: A Presumption of Liberty by Professor Randy E. Barnett.
Now that you have the philosophical basis for liberty and freedom from "Atlas Shrugged," you can now learn the constitutional basis from "Restoring the Lost Constitution" to start exerting you protected and written down, locked-in liberties, as I have.
With Professor Barnett's "training" I have successfully stopped local government from taking private property from private property owners without just compensation twice (an historical district designation and a retail only use ordinance)and now am taking on a proposed "smoke-free" ordinace in my county.
I am determined to turn the tide from being a servant of government to the master of government, as it should be.
When medicine is run by the middleman, you get only middlin' medicine.
All that said, I must say that I still agree with most her ideas. Her insight was both radical and revolutionary in her time, as it still is now, and will be for quite a long time into the future.
Of all the great and wondrous advancements of the 20th century I would have to say the greatest was the discover of penicillin and anti-biotics.
Was this achievement made in the private sector or with government sponsorship?
I live in Australia where medicine is almost totally socialised. We are penalised a 1.5% levy on incomes to pay for it. Hospitals are badly managed, waiting lists for simple ops are years long, many patients die before getting their surgery, doctors are opting out of being told how much they can earn, ob-gyns are becoming a dying profession. Nurses have waited 16 months to get a pay rise of 3.4% a year over 3 years, whilst the pollies gave themselves a 9% a year rise for the next 4 years, starting immediately.
If Americans dont start to fight against this thing now, you are heading for the same disastrous scenario.
By the way, does anyone know where I can get this book?
Sadly the nursing unions and the doctors associations have also strongly been pushing for government control. First to protect their monopolies, then to attain the power that only they can perscribe drugs.
Infact it is also the doctors who are now pushing for all vitamins, herbs and minerals to be able to get only with a perscription - from them of course. Its hard to feel sympathy for them, when they have been and are still pushing the hardest for state control.
They tried this in Aus. but there was such a public outcry about not being able to buy a few vitamins they had to drop it. Of course, this is going to happen when the best minds just dont go into medicine because it is so controlled. You end up with mediocrity which does try to control everyone itself. That's when medicine becomes very dangerous.
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