Robert Graboyes writes Why We Need to Liberate America’s Health Care

Excerpts:

Step into a time machine and travel back to 1989. Gather a group of people and tell them of the advances that medical science has made in 25 years — statins, new vaccines, face transplants, and so forth. The audience will be pleased and gratified by the news, but there is little that will shock them.

Now tell them the following story (from my paper):

While camping high in the Rockies, Efram signed and deposited his paycheck in his bank account. Then he purchased The Complete Works of Shakespeare and read Macbeth. A bit later, on YouTube, he watched the Beatles sing “Yellow Submarine.” Using Google Translate, he converted the lyrics into Hindi and then Skyped his friend Arjun, who is working at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Efram sang his translation to Arjun, who grimaced, but then commented on the beauty of the towering mountain behind Efram. After hanging up, Arjun emailed a restaurant in Denver (a city he has never visited), and an hour later a drone delivered Indian food to Efram’s campsite—all paid for with bitcoins. While eating his tikka masala, Efram toured McMurdo Station via Street View and asked Siri for the current temperature there. “Brrrr. It’s 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, Efram,” she answered. Then he accessed Netflix and watched Seven Samurai before dozing off to a selection of Malian jazz, courtesy of iTunes Radio. The entire cost of this sequence of events was $34.77 — $0.99 for the Kindle edition of Shakespeare, $2.00 for the film, $26.78 for the food, and $5.00 for the drone delivery service. And the whole set of interactions required only Efram’s iPad and Arjun’s cell phone — the two devices together costing less than $1,000.

Now, your audience will assume you are lying or delusional. And yet to our 2014 eyes, every step of this story is mundane and familiar — except for the drone delivering dinner to the mountain. And drone deliveries are perfectly feasible; it’s just that drones are the only part of the story that remain in the Fortress.

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