"Ayn Rand" (who is largely unknown in Europe, even in the most conservative or laissez faire capitalist quarters, I'm always surprised how much she rings a bell with people here, this must be the most educated forum in the world!) is just my acronym for a radical, pure-to-the-bone, Darwinistic outlook on life, society and economy. I see her as a purely theoretical thinker largely influenced and explained by her own childhood/youth experiences with "collectivism" (or what came in the guise of it) under Stalin in Russia (where she came from before her parents took her to America). She was never a practicing politician and her one-trick-recipe cannot ever work with humans just a communism can't. We're tribal animals by nature - like all primates - and not lonely predators that only meet a species member of the opposite sex once a year to mate and ensure survival of the species. A society built on her principles would be doomed to failure, an "Ayn Rand state" an oxymoron because she is all about atomizing society and discarding the glue that holds us together because she saw that as an impediment to human individual development away from the collectivist herd animal. I think she realized that inherent self-destruction element of her thinking which is why she shunned a wider political role and saw her theories more as an ointment to be used sparingly in a Roosevelt America where "the big state" was not yet a four-letter word.
She was no Immanuel Kant, no Karl Marx and no Adam Smith. But her theories are interesting in the same way that study of the isolated plague virus is interesting and enlightening for science. For good reason, she is not a serious contemporary political influence, Tea Party members are glowing socialists in comparison to her, her ideas "work" only under laboratory conditions.
Someone mentioned resources. It is true, a healthcare system available to all has to be affordable and that means that it cannot give everything to everyone, but it should give the same to all - if you want or need more (and can afford it) there is (Ayn Rand will breathe a sigh of relief from her hopefully solitary situated grave) additional private health insurance.
As such health education is of course key and people must be alerted about their wrong eating habits though - make no mistake - eating more than we need when there is enough of it around is biologically triggered in us. Any animal will gain weight in surroundings where food is affluent, I just need to take a look at some of my reptiles! (Though even members of the same species do not gain or lose the same amount of weight under identical living conditions.) That is not to say that you cannot consciously decide against it, but it is a decision against an archaic urge and not all people are equally good at reining that urge.
Allocation of money within a healthcare system is another issue. There are non-Darwinist people out there who say that if a health care system refused heart transplants and used all that
saved money to improve sterile conditions and general hyghiene in hospitals hundred of thousands or even millions of people would be saved rather than just a few thousand through heart transplants. It's a kind of triage thinking: If you have limited resources apply them where they generate the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people with the greatest chance of success (don't operate the soldier with the stomach wound, he'll likely die, the operation will take too much time and he is just one), but rather care for the many lightly wounded waiting outside the tent so that they don't die from infections. You can't argue with the statistics of that, but can it be decided humanely? Immanuel and Ayn probably couldn't agree on that one either. Don't try explaining it to a heart patient either.
Uwe
Ps: with a thankful nod to Neil Peart for introducing him first to the mind world of Ayn Rand.
PPS: I have a hunch that ole Ayn, though she had officially a hetero-relationship/marriage, was a, what's the official term used here again?, a, uhum, "doughnut bumper" too. Being lesbian doesn't prevent you from having irksome political concepts. ; - )
