Some futures are not much fun to contemplate - IX

A few days ago I read that ‘socialized medicine’ is when the doctors are employees of the state and the hospitals, drugstores, home health agencies and other facilities are owned and controlled by the government.

That's as good a definition as any.

But most people don't care about definitions like this because they already know what they want.

And IMO most people already know that they want a single-payer health care system, even though what most people really mean, but don't know that they mean it, is a single-payer health-insurance system but never mind that technicality because everyone knows that our health care delivery system is, like, broken, and everyone also knows that a single payer whatever-it-is will fix our broken health care delivery system and, even if it doesn't, people won't need to worry any more that health care is expensive because the government or someone else will pay for it, so when anyone wants any kind of health service it will promptly be provided to them by the world's best professionals and paid for without serious challenge at nominal or zero personal cost to them, and that will mean we all live longer, healthier lives, we can drink and eat whatever we wish, infant mortality will disappear and, oh yeah, all our children will grow up handsome and above average, and even though the experts disagree sometimes sharply over the impact of single-payer whatever-it-is, and, even though people don't really care to know the whole truth about other countries’ experience with single-payer whatever-it-is, that doesn't, like, matter because everyone knows single-payer whatever-it-is works better than whatever it is we have now because Michael Moore told us so, and therefore it’s obvious that we need to change the old whatever-it-is to the new whatever-it-is as soon as possible and the problems are all George Bush’s fault anyway.

Something like that.

So I think there is no doubt that socialized something-or-other is coming to the U.S.

And that right soon.