I’m rereading Gen LaGreca’s novel, Noble Vision, for the umpteenth time. In all this talk of healthcare “reform,” I desperately needed the vision of the kind of doctor who succeeds in a free system — and the kind of health care we could enjoy if we had one.

Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:

He’d never understood why people said that doctors should derive no selfish reward from the care they provide. He felt the most glorious sense of pride from saving someone’s life, and he could not make the grueling effort that medicine required without fervently loving his work. He knew the world meant that he could love his profession and derive spiritual fulfillment from it but that he should not love making money from it…

Was he supposed to offer people the ultimate value, their very health and existence, yet not desire a financial reward for his services the way in which the provider of a house, a car, or a swimming pool would? Because their services are more valuable than those offered by others, are doctors to be prohibited from setting the terms of their own compensation? Are doctors to be punished because they offer so much? Because they are…good?

Get the word out about this book. We need it now, desperately — but not only does it contain a much-needed message about free markets in medicine, it’s also a gripping, powerful story. Ayn Rand said that the purpose of a novel is to tell a story, not to preach — yet it can still teach by showing us how our lives could and should be. And that is just what Noble Vision does.

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