Just wondering...

How can a country that is bankrupt possibly afford to give healthcare services to all its citizens?

It can't, of course. But that won't prevent the powers that be from promising it anyway.

Bad ideas have consequences, as witnessed by the seizing up of financial systems globally. The primary cause is understood to be leverage -- buying now, hoping to pay later -- enabled and hyperleveraged by "financial engineering."

Suffering, as so many are, through the consequences of the wedding of bad policy with powerful technology, people ought to be forgiven for wondering what sort of Frankenstein a nationalized healthcare scheme might create.

One can't help what sorts of creative ways quants being prodded by bureaucrats might come up with to balance books that cannot in reality be balanced. What sorts of cost cutting measures might they dream up. Might they run complex models that the cost of healthcare to the taxpayers might be reduced by X-millions of dollars per year for each day that X infirm citizens life-spans are shortened?

Is it not inevitable that there will be whiz-bang genetic tests that "prove" that a certain baby is bound to have this certain infirmity and therefore will be too costly to allow to be born?

Too bad we can't put the "fiction" back into "science fiction."