Sci-Fi extrapolation can become reality…
As readers of my novels know, my stories treat important themes. Here’s one: healthcare will become a worldwide problem. It already is in the U.S., of course, because the whole system is based on making money for greedy Big Pharma, greedy insurance companies, and greedy healthcare networks and their associated professionals. But other places will have problems too. Even single-payer systems will have problems as they start having to limit costs in order to cover everyone.
Here’s a recent headline: “British Health System Felt the Strain of Cuts: Doctors Vent over Being Overwhelmed” (NY Times, 1/4/18). What? The standard for single-payer systems is in trouble? Of course, this is a question of governmental priorities—the conservative PM Theresa May is in trouble. and she can’t control her party’s desire to slash anything that benefits the middle class and poor. Sound familiar? Speaker Paul Ryan has proposed slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to pay for the deficit increases attributable to the tax cuts for corporations and the rich. And Trump’s proposed budget does exactly that!
OK, I made a New Year’s resolution not to write any more political op-ed and dedicate myself to storytelling this year, but that’s the point of this article: warnings in many sci-fi stories can easily become reality. While that’s true in general for any story (I watched the movie Enemy of the State again recently and thought, “it’s much worse now!”), sci-fi writers often extrapolate current problems into the future. They sometimes get it almost right, like Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451—we aren’t burning books yet, of course, but we’re doing much the same thing because the number of readers is diminishing, and our illiterate-in-chief in the White House seems only to be capable of reading business charts with bulleted items, if that, and surely wants to burn one book in particular if extracts from it are any indication.
But back to healthcare. I’ve been concerned about it ever since Nixon and the president of Kaiser Permanente sat down and invented the HMO concept, figuring there was a lot of money to be made on the backs of the infirm and poor. The system we now have in America should fulfill their wildest dreams…and U.S. citizens’ wildest nightmares.
I probably co-opted the phrase “full medical” for the title of my first published novel from Frederik Pohl—that’s a theme in his novel Gateway (part of the HeeChee Chronicles). Of course, no one in the U.S. besides the filthy rich and government people have complete medical coverage, so Pohl’s main character would feel right at home in our current setting—he wouldn’t need the HeeChee. My version of that book has a 1976 copyright, so Pohl beat me by some thirty years—my novel Full Medical was published in 2006 (it now even has a second ebook edition). But I make more specific predictions than Pohl did in reference to the theme of health care (so much so that one idiot reviewer thought it was a medical book).
Here’s one: I imagine a strong black market in body parts, leading in its extreme to clones being used to generate them for the one-percenters, including corporate and government VIPs. This book is the first in the “Clones and Mutant Series.” In the world of 2053, most people without full medical coverage just die; the rich elites can live forever with body parts taken from their clones. The first is happening now, of course, so we don’t have to wait for 2053; the second is a distinct possibility. After Dolly, human cloning WAS possible, and they’ve done it with other animals, so it’s not surprising that many nations have outlawed it. And with that personalized source of body parts, free from the danger of rejection, we have the ultimate full medical policy for the rich and famous.
Of course, Pohl was writing his HeeChee stories in the seventies when “sci-fi thriller,” that is, a combination of sci-fi and thriller, hadn’t yet been invented. To his credit, there’s plenty of action in his trilogy, but my three novels combine the two genres. But when it comes to health care, his “solution” is less probable than mine. The theme recurs all through the “Clones and Mutants Series,” starts in earnest in the bridge novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan (nursing homes for the elderly, with a nasty government wrinkle for certain elders), continues after the clone series in the bridge novel Soldiers of God, and ends with the dystopian nightmares of the Chaos in the first book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” Survivors of the Chaos (the trilogy is bundled in The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, a real value for readers).
I’m not going to claim that everything dealing with health care in my books will come to pass, but I’m definitely afraid it will. More importantly, given current events in the world, exemplified by the first few paragraphs of this post, we know that health care will be an important theme for sci-fi to consider for a long time. And that’s critical: no sci-fi storytelling should be without important themes where the futuristic setting can provide us with the opportunity to stand back a little and analyze objectively what it all means.
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In libris libertas…
