I can’t help but think of Atlas Shrugged, the great Ayn Rand novel, when I think of health care issues. Listen to Doc Thompson talk to Bob Hackett on 700 WLW about prescription drug addiction, Medicare fraud and various health care related topics.

In Atlas Shrugged Hank Rearden invents a new metal called Rearden Metal which is stronger, lighter and can be produced in larger quantities much cheaper than traditional steel. It’s so good that the government offers to buy him out to prevent the metal from hitting the market. Their reason is that the metal is too good, and will cost many steel workers their jobs because those companies producing traditional steel will not be able to compete. Sounds like farm subsidies to me, and countless other debacles the government has stuck its nose in to prevent pure completion which embraces technological advancement. Ayn Rand’s book is fiction but written over 50 years ago, it is all coming true almost exactly as she warned us. Case in point, look what the government did with General Motors.

Speaking of a car company like GM, a similar story could be told about Preston Tucker who invented the Tucker Car in the late 40’s. The government sent Senator Ferguson of Michigan, representing the big car companies of Detroit to go after Tucker with legalities, all of which were explored in Ayn’s book, but this wasn’t any fiction. Tucker nearly found himself in jail, and he lost his car company because his car was “too good.” The big three couldn’t keep up with Preston. So the government cut the knees out from under the innovator to protect the status quo. The result of this intervention was predicted by Ayn Rand and can be seen clearly now. The Motor City’s engine is dying. Detroit’s population shrank by more than 25% in the last decade, according to Census statistics reported in the New York Times. The city’s population fell to 713,777 in 2010, a drop of almost 240,000 residents. That’s 100,000 more than Katrina-ravaged New Orleans lost.

See the rest of the Detroit article here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/increbile-shrinking-city-detroit-becoming-ghost-town-20110323-095202-383.html

The government should have left Tucker alone and forced the car manufactures of Detroit to compete. But government did what it always does, it corrupted innovation and growth with an attempt to control the manufacturing process. And 60 years later, look at Detroit. But the jobs the senator and his friends were protecting lasted so those people could retire and go fishing for a couple of years, and that’s all that mattered to those people during that time. They didn’t care what would happen to Detroit a half a century later. They only thought of themselves.

Well, the same thing goes on in every industry, most notably the health care industry.

Health care now has its own version of Rearden Metal. It’s called regenerative tissue construction, and DNA engineering. See my article with videos about regenerative medicine here: Well worth your time in investigation.

We have arrived at a time and place where the human being can change what getting older means. We don’t have to take pharmaceutical medicine any longer, or at least we shouldn’t have to. Science has arrived to make such things seem barbaric. Growing new body parts and fixing all illnesses, genetic defects, and even cancer rests within genetic engineering, and will very, very soon be as common to our language as television is now, compared to a person that remembers life without television. The human body can repair itself. It built itself within a mother’s womb and can always regenerate all tissue at any time. Those secrets have begun to be unlocked.

Hospitals except for emergency surgery such as gun shots, car crashes and other traumas will become unnecessary. Doctor visits less needed. And prescription drugs including the thousands of drug stores all over the country are going to become useless.

There won’t be a need for health care such as what we have today. I sat in a recent meeting with my health care provider where they explained that the costs had gone up again this year. I wondered how long any of the people working in that industry think this can continue. The health care industry is where education and other public sector positions are at; at the maximum amount that society can or should be willing to pay for their services. The people working in these fields are in for a shock if they are not prepared to adapt to the changes.

Medicare is a corrupt system that costs all of us a treacherous amount of money.

This kind of thing has to stop. Obama Care will only exacerbate this kind of behavior. We need a lot less of this fraud and abuse, not more. And regenerative science will give us the option. It will allow us to extend the retirement age to perhaps 100 to 150 years old. It will solve our Social Security problems, and it will eliminate much of the expensive abuses that go on in the medical industry. But it will require human beings to think differently. And humans aren’t good at that. Look at these idiots in London today, just because the government wants to cut its costs, which is the responsible thing to do. People like this are parasites to innovation and are incredibly short-sighted and define why I can’t stand unions.

The great moral question of tomorrow will be a religious one, how long should we live? Do we have a right to manipulate the aging process? The answer is that of course we do, because we already do with prescription drugs, that we’ve all come to accept it as a reality. The next natural step in that scientific advancement is regenerative medicine. We have to look at it as the only moral solution to our current funding dilemma and it is the most humane way to deal with handicaps and debilitating illnesses.

Government already knows this, but they will not act on it until the money runs out. They will attempt to not become unpopular with voters working in the medical industry, nurses, doctors, insurance companies, health care providers, pharmacists, drug manufactures, etc. There is so much money generated in health care that government will cling to an old archaic system just to preserve jobs.

The medical industry as we know it will change. New jobs will be created, but they will be different roles, and there will be a lot of resistance to those changes. Drug manufactures will spend billions of dollars to prevent people from trusting new forms of medicine, just as steel lobbyists in Atlas Shrugged tried to keep a new metal from hitting the market. They don’t want the cost of competition. They, just like those in the education profession, cling to the old way of doing things, because their pensions and job security are tied to it.

I’ve changed professions 5 times in my adult life, because I’ve always adapted to change. I have never fallen in love with any position I’ve held, but always viewed them as a way to supply income to my family. I have never thought of retiring with a pension from a job. I will work as long as I feel like doing something for income. I have no intention to wither away into a gradual degradation of my body and spend the rest of my day’s fishing. In fact, I think any human being that views their life as an hourglass is a fool that sets unneeded psychological limits upon themselves. We live in an exciting age that should embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of free enterprise, the way America did leading up to the Civil War, and ironically the introduction of Marxism from Europe around the middle of the 19th century. Government needs to get out of the way of the safety business, the regulation business, the job creation business, in fact, it needs to get out of the way completely. Let everything that will fail, fail, and let innovation solve our problems.

I know what it’s like to lose a job. I’ve had periods of wealth, and periods of complete collapses. I can remember vividly days where I rode my bicycle to work 12 miles each way all year-long to save money on gas. And I’ve worked every job and odd job one can dream up from sales to janitorial work and everything in between. I’ve been on the bottom and have been on top. I know what I’m asking when I tell people to be bold, not to worry, and not to cling too tightly to the job you currently hold, because to do so prevents innovation which is necessary to the growth of our nation, and ultimately beneficial to our everyday lives. What is the point of arguing about retirement and pensions if such things aren’t needed in a future where life expectancy will double or triple within the next two decades? And to those of you reading this that think what I’m saying is science fiction, check it out for yourself. There is only one reason for us to continue dying at age 65 to 85, and that is to protect the jobs of those in the health care industry. That’s the only reason, because science is bringing us new options that many people would forgo in favor of security. Think what an absurd notion it is to consider that someone would trade a life of limitless adventure and unknown excitement for one that is certain to end about 10 years after retirement. Yet those in government that seek to suppress these new scientific discoveries will do just that, because they are short-sighted puppets to lobbies sent by pharmaceutical companies to stifle the creativity of our nation, and are themselves cancers to our inventive spirit.

I see those pharmaceutical lobbyists as corrosive and foolish as the typical labor union, which also cleaves like idiots to the mundane existence of life between the break bells and an eye toward retirement where they can finally live their own life, just as it is ending.

The question is do you have what it takes to say yes to life? Because in saying yes, you say you have the courage to reinvent yourself as many times as needed to always look with an eye toward the rising sun and leave the false security to those seeking sunsets.

And in saying yes, the world may crumble, but it will be rebuilt with something much better and stronger than would have otherwise been possible.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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