Quite the understatment actually. I would go further saying that Alistaire McIntyre (whose name I realize inspires a certain degree of justified skepticism here) was perfectly accurate in After Virture characterizing our modern era as one occupied by the obsession of the individual liberated from all. Julia vs Galt is a nice distillation of that condition and it seems to me is in dire need of overturning before we get anywhere one these larger topics.

An additional note on the issue of the health care debate. Everything that I see on this subject seems to ignore the most obvious solution which is increasing accessibility to healthcare by leveraging innovation that is already in motion. To illustrate, I recently purchased an iphone 4S for $100 that has functionality and processing power that would exceed a $3000 laptop 15 years ago. That’s a 30 fold reduction in cost over 15 years.

So why aren’t we applying that same kind of innovation to the healthcare sector?

The good news is we are:

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567208-medical-technology-hand-held-diagnostic-devices-seen-star-trek-are-inspiring

The bad news is, because of the politicized way we view problems such as healthcare, which has more to do with appealing to voting constituencies than actually deploying true innovative expertise, we’re throwing up unintentional obstacles to those same promising possibilities.

A case in point. Many now know that a part of Obamacare involves a medical devices tax on medical device companies of approximately 2.5% of income. This is catastrophic for R&D which at best is usually 5% of company’s income. Because our healthcare focus is on funding accessibility and not innovation we’re effectively cutting that part of our innovation industry in half which is the part that most likely was going to find the solutions that will make healthcare truly more accessible. And for those who are skeptical I can tell you, as someone who works in the tech field, I have friends who have been downsized in the R&D departments of a number of medical device companies for precisely this reason.

As long as our solutions are political and not innovative we will continue to get the kind of shoddy policy outcomes that we are seeing now.