I single-handedly saved the entire health care industry today. Okay, that might be exaggerated just a bit, but hear me out.

I arrived at my orthopedic doctor’s office at the appointed time, opened a book, and settled in for an expected long wait. A full hour later a nurse showed me to an examination room, and asked me what the problem was. I explained that I had a hairline fracture on a bone in my forearm and that I had already been to InstaCare, who had x-rayed and found the injury. I told her that InstaCare had emailed the x-rays to their office.

“Oh, well our computers have been down all day and we won’t be able to download them,” she answered.

Did I mention that this was 5:35 in the afternoon, four days after I had been to InstaCare? Did I also mention that this was something that I had told them over the phone when I set up my appointment? If they knew all day that they wouldn’t have been able to see the x-rays anyway, would not a simple phone call have saved us both a lot of time?

I own a small service business, and my common practice is to call and let customers know when I will not be able to perform any part of the agreed upon service, or if I am going to be later than the agreed upon time. Maybe it’s just me, but I consider it a matter of common courtesy, not to mention a good business practice.

The nurse then told me that we would have to take another x-ray. I asked if there would be an additional charge to which she answered, “Yes.”

By the way, have I mentioned that my wife and I pay $787 per month for health insurance? Yes, that’s right–$787 per month — another house payment in our budget. You’d think that we had spent enough to pay for several open-heart surgeries and a few chemotherapy treatments after a few months of that.

Well, now that I consider the fact that the hospital once charged us $462 for a 2-minute procedure to draw my wife’s blood, I guess that $787 is a small drop in the bottomless bucket of the health care industry.

At this point of my visit I decided that enough was enough. I stood up from the x-ray table and told the nurse forcefully, “My appointment was at 4:30. You mean to tell me that I waited for an hour for you to tell me that you can’t access my x-rays, that you’ll have to take yet another x-ray, and that there will be an additional charge?”

With that I marched out of the office determined to take care of myself.

I made it to my car in the parking lot when the nurse ran up to me to tell me that the doctor would do the x-ray for free. At the moment I was too upset to think of a clear response. I think I just muttered a defiant “No!,” or something equally as brilliant.

Had I been thinking more clearly, this is how I would have responded: “For free, you say? That translates into, “Steve, the doctor says that somebody else is going to pay for your x-ray.

“There is no such thing as free! Why would I stamp out of your office on principle, refusing to pay another red cent to a defective system, and then allow somebody else to pay for my troubles like a sniveling child?

“No, thank you, you can keep your ‘free’ x-ray and you can keep your dependent health care system. As for me, I’m going to take personal responsibility and take care of my own body.”

Now, here I am with my defiant principles on the one hand, and a broken arm on the other. Lest you discard me as an extremist, allow me to explain my position in more depth.

I am not against health care; in fact, the very doctor I just walked out on performed surgery on my knee and saved me from a lifetime of pain. My own father was saved from heart disease by the miracle of modern medicine. What I have realized, however, is that much of our health care system reflects a deep cultural problem. We live in a culture which is dependent upon experts for even trivial details that we could handle ourselves. We rely upon conveniences so much that we fail to maintain a healthy body and lifestyle. We fail to plan for the future because of our belief in quick fixes.

Let me share another example. The other morning, I went out to my car to find that it wouldn’t start. I opened the hood — a hood I have not opened myself more than perhaps twice in 105,000 miles — to find that a battery terminal was completely corroded due to acid leaking from the battery. Luckily, a friendly neighbor with a rope towed my car to a nearby shop, and I then waited for three days for a simple battery cable to be replaced for $105.

Had I taken more personal responsibility and been more self-sufficient, I would have been performing regular check-ups and maintenance on my own car, I would have diagnosed the problem earlier, and I could have replaced the battery for a few bucks and in a few minutes. But I have become dependent upon the mechanical experts to the point of passing them the buck on even the simplest of operations.

Our dependence upon specialized experts and convenience leads to destructive and short-sighted habits and thought patterns. It makes us focus on the here and now and makes us think that we don’t have to plan for the future. We run our cars and our bodies into the ground because we believe that when they break down an expert can fix them at the drop of a hat. After all, if I can cook dinner in 5 minutes in the microwave, shouldn’t I be able to take a pill to solve all of the problems that the same microwave dinner is causing to my body?

We fill our bodies with fats, sweets, and preservatives, and then we are actually surprised to find that we have high cholesterol. Even then, after the surprise, we believe that taking prescription drugs will cure us, as opposed to just living right. We pour more and more quick-fixes (i.e. money) into our educational system and then are surprised when our children fail tests or repeatedly test lower than other nations.

We regularly sue doctors and insurance companies over petty claims in order to receive the convenience of quick cash, and then complain that our health insurance is so expensive. We rely upon Social Security so much that we fail to save in personal accounts. Some of us even believe that militarily imposing “democracy” upon Iraq will actually cure the disease of terrorism.

Generally speaking, we have strayed far from our roots of personal responsibility and ownership and have become a nation of dependents. We depend upon the government for so-called “safety nets,” we depend on corporations for health care and retirement benefits, we depend on specialized experts to do things that we should be doing for ourselves, and we depend on conveniences to save us time and effort.

Incidentally, in a world full of conveniences relative to 100 years ago, why do we have so little time?

Now I don’t want to be another gloomy, self-righteous critic. I’d rather contribute to the solution instead of just pointing out problems. I propose, then, a three-part vision that will begin the much needed cultural change.

1. There Are No Quick Fixes

This simple realization will help us to work on curing the roots of social ills as opposed to hacking at the leaves. When we truly believe this, we will stop pouring money into inefficient and inoperative systems and, instead, will work on fixing the system itself. Adopting an attitude of long-term, generational change will allow us to create genuine solutions, rather than using temporary band-aids. We will understand that quick fixes only create more problems than they solve.

2. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

When we can understand that nothing comes free, we will begin to connect the dots between “government” programs and the private citizens who pay for them. We will see that the government is the people — not some detached and self-sustaining entity, like a business. We will understand that governments cannot and do not create wealth; they merely redistribute forcefully what citizens create. We will know that any income or benefit that we receive that was not earned by our own labor and intellect, short of voluntary charity, was taken forcibly from another person. Any time we hear the word “free,” we will automatically raise a red flag in our mind and immediately begin looking for the catch.

3. Personal Responsibility

We live in a sue-happy society; everyone wants to find someone — other than themselves, of course — to blame. Fault-finding has become a highly profitable business. We have stopped doing our own research and we hold others responsible when things go wrong. If a real estate deal goes sour, we blame our agent. If our health declines, we blame our doctor.

We have got to start realizing that we alone are responsible for ourselves. Even when things happen beyond our control, such as the case with my broken arm caused by an accident playing basketball, we can still take responsibility for our responses to those accidents. In fact, that is the precise meaning of responsibility — being able to choose our responses. I can’t perform brain surgery on myself, but I can take care of a slightly broken bone by simply doing a little research and using a little common sense.

This is not an easy process; it forces us to see our true selves beyond the self-deceit, and it requires — heaven forbid — a little effort. But it is urgent and necessary for our culture to survive. We must stop looking upward and outward for answers, and begin looking downward and inward.

Our politicians can’t save us with more burdensome programs. Our corporations can’t guarantee any type or level of security, no matter how badly we want to believe that. Our doctors can’t mend lifetimes of unhealthy living, even with “miracle” pills. Our educational system cannot educate our children as well as we can. We, as individuals, hold within us the answer to any societal and governmental dilemma facing us. We must change, and as we change individually, we change the world.

The health care reformation begins when individuals walk out of inefficient hospital systems vowing to be more self-reliant. The educational revolution begins as parents take back their responsibility to educate in the home and in private institutions. The political reformation begins as people realize that there is no free lunch and stop voting for more government benefits. The cultural revolution begins and ends with one person who develops deep integrity and virtue.

I began by proclaiming that I saved the health care industry by walking out on it. A deliberate overstatement, to be sure, but can you imagine our world if everyone who was truly able simply walked out of the defective system of dependence to create a new system based on personal responsibility and self-reliance? Let’s change our culture by walking out on its defects while maintaining its healthy origins. Let’s stop waiting for someone or some institution to save us and begin seeing the savior in us all.

Where there is crisis there is opportunity, and nowhere was this more evident than in Hurricane Katrina.

In at least one respect, the disaster was more devastating, yet offered more hope, than the 9/11 tragedy.

As monumental as it was in terms of shaping national politics and policies, 9/11 was primarily perceived as a New York crisis. Those of us in other parts of the country watched it unfold on television and felt the emotions of the tragedy, but otherwise were relatively unaffected.

Aside from a sharp dip accompanied by a quick recovery in the stock market, we weren’t directly and immediately affected economically, politically, or culturally by 9/11.

Yet just days after the New Orleans hurricane, the entire nation was affected directly and negatively in the form of steep gas price hikes.

According to the Oil Price Information Service, the national average price for gas hit an all-time high on September 5th, 2005 at $3.057 per gallon, a 32.6% increase from one month earlier.

Many Republicans and Democrats alike are demanding immediate federal action to arrest the price hikes, yet most proposals fall far short of what is ultimately needed. If we can look beyond the immediate crisis we will recognize and seize the opportunity to thoroughly reform and revolutionize our national energy policies and practices.

Although the nation is sharply divided over Bush administration post-9/11 defense policies, the New Orleans crisis, by virtue of its universal impact, provided the nation with the chance to coalesce across party divisions behind the common goal of energy policy reform.

We may not want to admit it, but it has become increasingly self-evident to most of us that we are being held hostage by our dependence on oil. The problem is not just that we depend on foreign nations diametrically opposed to American values and needs, but also that oil by its very nature as a fossil fuel is ultimately a limited, and therefore potentially scarce, resource.

No matter how much oil reserves the earth still may hold, it’s just common sense to begin at least considering alternative, renewable sources of fuel before it reaches the stage of scarcity and plunges us into further crises.

The decline of the Industrial Age and the rise of the Information Age are revolutionizing most aspects of our economics, politics, and culture.

It is a time of potentially great chaos as increased technological development creates new jobs while making others obsolete, as globalism transforms our political boundaries, as new class systems develop with different values, and virtually thousands of other changes occur both seen and unseen.

The height of wisdom is to perceive and adapt calmly and rationally to change before it occurs, rather than waiting to be forced to evolve hastily and without a clear vision in the throes of crisis. As the trite adage goes, the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.

As tragic as it was, the New Orleans hurricane offered us an historical opportunity to enact constructive and revolutionary changes to our national energy policies and practices, but that depends on our attitude and maturity.

Will conservatives continue to instinctively and shortsightedly support the excessive use of oil? Will liberals simply exploit the crises to further their cause of increasingly large government control?

Or can we work together as Americans to look forward to a bright future, rationally and optimistically?

There is a silver lining in the clouds of Hurricane Katrina if we can allow ourselves to let go of our Industrial Age gut reactions and embrace new and progressive attitudes of the Information Age.