Atlas Shrugged - substitute health care for trains

I've been re-reading Atlas Shrugged recently.

Yes, it has some flaws - it was written in the 1950s and Rand seems to think that no other countries exist except the US and Mexico. Well - she's simplifying things to get her points across.

The book has two main plots.

In the first plot, all the "men of the mind" are disappearing, leaving their businesses behind, with only inept men to run them. Dagny Taggart, head of operations of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad, has to fight against the ineptness of the businessmen who are left in order to get a new rail laid in order to save her company.

In the second plot, her brother, James Taggart, the actual president of the railroad, is collaborating with those individuals who want to see the US head the way of socialism.

To cut a long story short, eventually the great Taggart Transcontinental is subsumed by the goverment's Railroad Unification Plan. According to this, all the railroads have to put money into a common pool, and then they are paid according to how much track they have to maintain. Taggart Transcontinental has the most miles of track - but the track goes to places that no one uses. So they are being paid a lot of money to maintain track no one uses. Meantime, the train companies that have small amounts of track that actually serve people, are going bankrupt because they don't get to keep any of their profits.

When I read through this, I am reminded so much of how the insurance companies are being destroyed by ObamaCare. First we're told that we'll be able to keep our own doctors and our own plans...but it has gradually been revealed that insurance companies won't be able to make a profit, and so they are going out of the insurance business, so only the government will be left - sort of like what happened to the student loan business.

And we all know how competent the government is at running things - that's why we're bankrupt and borrowing millions of dollars a day, that, if called upon to repay, we wouldn't be able to do. That's why many of our cities are bankrupt.