I Want to Believe

By Kim Bellard, May 26, 2022

I know, I should be writing about hot topics like monkeypox or the baby formula shortage, but, c’mon, Congress held hearings last week about UFOs — the first in 50 years! I mean, I followed Project Blue Book in the 1970’s, watched “The X-Files” in the 1990’s, and have seen UFO videos on YouTube. If Congress is starting to take UFO’s seriously, how could I not?

And for those of you who don’t see any possible connection to healthcare (except for those unpleasant alien probes…), let me put it to you this way: by 2050, is it more likely that:

· We’ll know what UFOs actually are;

· We’ll have fundamentally reformed the U.S. healthcare system.

I thought so.

So, maybe UAPs are, indeed, aliens. Maybe some John Galt-type character has formed his/her/their own “men of the mind” collective to create new technologies for their own use. Maybe they’re all really only swamp gas. What we know is that we don’t (yet) know.

The intriguing thing to me is that they just seem way beyond our capabilities, beyond our understanding. They mystify us. They make our technology seem outdated. They sometimes seem to defy the laws of physics. Astrobiologist Hagg Misra told Science News, “Maybe they’re a sign of something like new physics.”

That, my friends, is exciting.

I like to think that UAPs were built in some teenager’s garage, using off-the-shelf materials in some novel way, piloted out by that teenager and his/her/their buddies out on a joy ride. Whether that garage is in Des Moines or Alpha Centauri, I don’t much care.

I love things that put us in our place, that remind us we don’t have all the answers, that open our minds to the realization that there’s a lot left to learn. 

Moral of the story: if you think you know how our healthcare system works and the constraints it must have, maybe you need to be open to healthcare’s UAPs — unidentified alterative possibilities.

In “The X-Files,” Fox Mulder’s unspoken (but not unwritten) mantra was “I Want to Believe.” As it turned out, there were UFOs, the aliens were among us, and there was an alien/government conspiracy. Sometimes being the lone believer isn’t crazy.

I want to believe in a healthcare system that is radically less expensive, much more effective, and delivers on health equity. I’m all for any new physics — or, I suspect, new biology — that helps us accomplish that healthcare system.

I’m waiting for the pill that fixes genetic defects, the harmless beam that destroys incipient cancers, the relentless nanobots that prevent strokes and heart attacks. I want the kind of healthcare I see in science fiction.

In today’s healthcare system, such miracles would find the pill hugely expensive, the beam’s side effects so bad that they might outweigh the benefits, and the nanobots prone to being hacked. Instead of technology being so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur Clark put it, in healthcare we get magic that overpromises, underdelivers, and costs too much.

Our healthcare system is a lot like those military aircraft — slow to change, incomparably costly, highly technical, reliant on skilled operators, disturbingly fragile, and deeply indebted to the healthcare/industrial complex. I hope for a healthcare UAP to outmaneuver them like a kid on a joyride.

I don’t want everyone to suddenly believe in UFOs, nor do I want anyone to assume that their technologies are beyond our capabilities. I do want us to let them open our minds to the possibilities they suggest.

Similarly, there are plenty of sightings to suggest that our healthcare system could be much better, but we’re going to need some true believers to make it so. Are you one of them?

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in Medium. Please follow Kim on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard)