Apple, Mindshare and Passion

It has become almost a cliche to say that Apple has a lock on mindshare unparalleled among technology companies. It is still 48 hours away for customers to buy iPads but the excitement and anticipation is reminiscent of the Harry Potter books. Can any other company equal this?

The iPad may not solve global warming and world hunger but you will be hard-pressed to convince the aficionados. Besides games and entertainment, the iPad is expected to make the health care process smoother and easier and, consequently, less expensive. Looking up patient records and sending data seamlessly to physicians for remote diagnosis are just two of the potential applications that can make the iPad an indispensable tool in hospitals and homes. Coming in the wake of Obama's revolutionary health care reform, the iPad is already poised to make history.

But there is a story behind the iPad story. And that story belongs to Steve Jobs. Nowhere will you find this story more eloquently expressed than in Jobs' commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.

"... it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me," said Jobs. " The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life ... Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did."

That is the story in a nutshell. Jobs loved what he did and that's why no setback could set him back. The great physicist Hans Bethe expressed the same sentiment: "Never work on a problem for which you do not have an unfair advantage." Where does the unfair advantage come from? From love for what you do.

Millions of Americans are now without jobs. The long shadow of recessions is unlikely to disappear soon. Yet if you are passionate about something - and you have to have something to be passionate about - nurture it and sooner or later the sun will shine through. As Jobs said, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life ... have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

So, no matter how useful the iPad may turn out to be, it will always be secondary to the story of the man who loves what he does and never loses faith in himself.

D-Day for Health Care Reform in America

The D-Day (as in “Defining-Day”) for health care reform in America arrives tomorrow, Sunday, March 21, 2010. Barack Obama has staked his young presidency on this bill. He will not become a lame-duck president if the bill fails to pass but there is no doubt that his image and effectiveness, at least in the short-term, will take a major hit.

Even among his die-hard supporters are those who feel that the president’s “obsession” with health care has diverted attention from the foremost problem facing America today: loss and lack of jobs. When Americans worry about having a roof over their heads or putting food on the table, seeing a physician becomes a luxury that can temporarily be dispensed with.

Yet there is also no denying that universal health care coverage is a right, not a privilege. Sure, the cost to the economy will be in hundreds of billions of dollars but can we, as a civilized and humane society, allow money and politics to trump what is fundamentally an ethical and moral issue? What kind of society will ours be if insurance companies continue to deny or revoke with impunity (the case of Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, is one of thousands of such cases) the coverage of Americans when they are afflicted with life-threatening conditions?

The idea underlying insurance companies is: Grab as much premium as possible from the healthy but exclude those who are sick. This macabre 'survival of the fittest' business model is unacceptable in any civilized society.

Obama’s administration has to bear responsibility for the cliffhanger that the health care bill has become. We Americans abhor serpentine language. We believe that if anything is worth fighting or dying for, we should be able to understand it without having to master the language of lawyers. Yet there has been no coherent explanation by the president or the democrats about why and how the heath care bill makes sense economically, socially and politically. Simply evoking the moral principle has played into the hands of Republicans. Their shrill warning that American capitalism, as we have known it for two hundred years, will die if the health care bill were to pass, has resonated with many fence-sitters simply because Democrats have not matched them in the “easy-to-understand” department. This is particularly ironic given the president’s reputation as a wordsmith and his facility in distilling an issue to its essence in words that can capture the imagination of Americans, as we saw repeatedly during his presidential campaign.

The American most passionate about health care reform was the “Liberal Lion of the Senate,” the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. That his seat is now occupied by a Republican who is against health care reform shows how far the fortune of the Democrats has fallen in a single year.

Yet I believe that tomorrow House Democratic leaders will find 216 votes to make the health care bill the law of the land. Like most Americans, I am a prisoner of hope (especially today, the first day of spring!) and I cannot accept the fact that 216 of our representatives will miss out on this historic milestone that will affirm the right of every American access to health care. It is almost as historic a milestone as the election of an African-American to the highest office in the land, and there will be enough, just enough, votes to see the bill through.