May 7, 2007
BostonNow, a local daily newspaper, ran a story today about The Lucidicus Project. The story was featured under the headline "Healthcare a right? 'Wrong'", and included a large color picture of the contents of the MISDK:

What lessons found in the philosophy of Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged could possibly be used to solve the problems of the healthcare industry?

Plenty, according to Jared Rhoads, founder of the Boston-based Lucidicus Project.

"The problem with the healthcare system is that it's fundamentally a philosophical problem," Rhoads said. Rhoads explains that the idea that healthcare is a right, is flawed.

Rhoads and his volunteers at the Lucidicus Project believe that without governmental regulations and control of healthcare, a self-regulated free-market based system would emerge and resolve many of the problems facing the country's current healthcare system.

"A laissez-faire capitalist society is the ideal society," Rhoads said. "It's the ideal economic social system that makes it possible for man to survive."

Even Rhoads admits that his idea of fixing healthcare through Rand's philosophy of objectivism is a controversial one.

One of the ways the Lucidicus Project approaches the task is through their free Medical Intellectual's Self-Defense Kit.

Rhoads gives the kits away for free to new medical students in hopes that it will inspire them early on to change the system from within.

The kit contains speeches and essays by Rand heir and objectivist philosopher, Leonard Peikoff as well as a copy of Rand's best selling book Atlas Shrugged.

September 2006
The Undercurrent included an announcement for The Lucidicus Project in its September issue. The Undercurrent is is an inter-campus, student-run newsletter. Its content is written primarily by (and for) college students across the country, with additional articles from the Ayn Rand Institute op-ed program and other writers. The text of the announcement, as printed:

The Lucidicus Project is offering free books to medical students interested in learning about the moral and economic case for capitalism.

August 6, 2006
The Boston Globe published a letter to the editor in its Sunday edition, August 6, 2006, responding to a July 31 op-ed by Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry. The Lucidicus Project is mentioned in the author byline. As printed:

IN CALLING for "big ideas and bold moves" from Washington, Senator Kerry suggests that market failure is to blame for the high cost of healthcare and health insurance today. But what part of these heavily regulated industries over the last 30 years has been left free to succeed? Entrepreneurs, not politicians, are the ones who innovate, increase productivity, and lower the costs of goods and services. Government money-shuffling between budgetary line items does not create real value; it only destroys incentives.

Kerry, however, is right about one thing: This issue is poised to move. An economy composed of part capitalism and part socialism is an unstable mix. Whoever finds the healthcare problem bewildering need only look past the fancy proposals to the history of the 20th century in order to decide which path leads to life and which leads to death.

JARED M. RHOADS
Medford
The writer is director of the Lucidicus Project, which advances the study of capitalism as it relates to the field of medicine.

May 1-4, 2006
The Lucidicus Project ran a four-day advertisement in the Harvard Crimson, the daily newspaper of the Harvard community. Paraphrasing a quotation by Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff, the text of the three-line advertisement read:

CAPITALISM IN MEDICINE
To save medicine is the simplest thing in the world. All one must do is think.
Visit The Lucidicus Project and discover the moral and economic case for capitalism in medicine and healthcare.