The Mystery (from the previous post):

<<Is it not _odd _that the more medical science and technology has
progressed, the more frequently physicians are denounced in the
media as dangerous, greedy exploiters of medically- ignorant and
vulnerable patients?

Is it not _strange_ that, rather than being viewed as the advocates,
champions, guardians and protectors of a patient's health, this role
has been expropriated by "progressive", "idealistic", populist
politicians, legions of Medicare and insurance bureaucrats and
crusading trial attorneys who piously vow to protect patients from
being "victimized" by money- hungry, greedy, exploitative doctors
allegedly seeking to fleece and defraud patients, insurance
companies and Medicare by foisting unnecessary medical procedures
and tests on the poor, the sick, the vulnerable and the medically
ignorant?"

What explains this apparent paradox? >>

The Martyrdom of the Doctors and Businessmen

The passage below from an American classic fictional novel gives us
a clue to the paradox described above. It captures a conversation
between Hank Rearden, a fictional captain of industry of great
ambition, productiveness, achievement, moral stature and integrity,
and his friend, Francisco.

Mr. Rearden has dedicated his life to the single-minded pursuit,
discovery and development of a miracle metal which has transformed
society by improving and extending the lives of citizens everywhere
who benefit from the incorporation of this new miracle metal into
all sorts of new products and life-saving and life-enhancing
technologies.

Yet, rather than being celebrated as a hero and rewarded both
materially and spiritually by the public for his great achievement,
society proceeds to condemn him as a dangerous villain, vilify him
for his hard-earned wealth as "loot exploited from innocent victims"
and demand ever-increasing government controls and regulations...to
shackle him like a dangerous criminal to his business which
generously produces the metal their lives depend on, at an ever-
decreasing benefit, and ever-increasing personal expense to himself.

His friend is asking him why he keeps working when others have
stopped under the same self-damaging and self-sacrificial
conditions.

Read the same passage...but imagine that Mr. Rearden is a doctor-
working under the same conditions of government regulation at the
same personal, financial and emotional expense to himself.

The passage below gives doctors an important diagnostic clue as to
who- and what- is actually destroying the medical profession and a
hint - as to what potential changes may be necessary to rid the
medical body politic of legions of feasting parasites in the process
of effecting a meaningful and lasting cure.

Is it really the competitive spirit that is killing him and which
his oppressors are counting on? Or something else?

------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Rearden: "Don't worry. I'm not going to vanish. Let them all
give up and stop working. I won't. I don't know my limit and don't
care. All I have to know is that I can't be stopped."

Francisco: "Any man can be stopped, Mr. Rearden."

"How?
"It's only a matter of knowing man's motive power."
"What is it?"
"You ought to know, Mr. Rearden. You're one of the last moral men
left to the world."

Rearden chuckled in bitter amusement. "I've been called just about
Everything but that. And you're wrong. You have no idea how wrong."

"Are you sure?"
"I ought to know. Moral? What on earth made you say it?"

Francisco pointed to the mills beyond the window. "This."
For a long moment, Rearden looked at him without moving, then
Asked only, "What do you mean?"

"If you want to see an abstract principle, such as a moral action,
in material form - there it is. Look at it, Mr. Rearden. Every
girder of it, every pipe, wire and valve was put there by a choice
in answer to the question: 'Right or Wrong' ?

You had to choose right and you had to choose the best within your
knowledge- the best for your purpose, which was to make steel-and
then move on and extend the knowledge, and do better, and still
better, with your purpose as your standard of Value.

You had to act on your own judgment, you had to have the capacity to
judge, the courage to stand on the verdict of your mind, and the
purest, the most ruthless consecration to the rule of doing right,
of doing the best, the utmost best possible to you.

Nothing could have made you act against your judgment, and you would
have rejected as wrong as evil -any man who attempted to tell you
that the best way to heat a furnace was to fill it with ice.

Millions of men, an entire Nation, were not able to deter you from
producing Rearden Metal- because you had the knowledge of its
superlative value and the power which such knowledge gives.

But what I wonder about, Mr.Rearden, is why you live by one code of
principles when you deal with nature?
And by another when you deal with men?"

Rearden's eyes were fixed on him so intently that the question came
slowly, as if the effort to pronounce it were a distraction: "What
do you mean?"

"Why don't you hold to the purpose of your life as clearly and
rigidly as you hold to the purpose of your mills?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they
tell you, but not in the way they preach.

The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt- and that is what
you have been doing all your life.,You have been paying blackmail,
not for your Vices, but for your Virtues.

You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment-
and to let it grow the heavier the greater the virtues you
practiced.

But your Virtues were those which keep men alive.

Your own moral code- the one you lived by, but never stated,
acknowledged or defended- was the code that preserves man's
existence.

If you were punished for it, what was the nature of those who
punished you?

Yours was the code of life. What, then, is theirs? What standard of
value lies at its root?

What is its ultimate purpose? Do you think that what you're facing
is merely a conspiracy to seize your wealth?
You, who know the source of wealth, should know it's much more and
much worse than that.

Did you ask me to name man's motive power?
Man's motive power is his moral code.
Ask yourself where their code is leading you and what it offers you
as your final goal.

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act
of virtue.
A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to
demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the
furnace, besides.

By their own statement, it is they who need you and have nothing to
offer you in return.
By their own statement, you must support them because they cannot
survive without you.

Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence and their need-
their need of you- as a justification for your torture. Are you
willing to accept it?

Do you care to purchase- at the price of your great endurance, at
the price of your agony- the satisfaction of the needs of your own
destroyers?"

"No!"

"Mr. Rearden," said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, "if you saw
Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw
that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his
arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the
last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the
world bore down upon his shoulders- what would you tell him to do?"

"I . . . don't know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell
him?"

"To shrug."

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