Notes on socialized medicine:

Michael Moore's SiCKO is opening in Britain this week, but the British are not amused. Anyone can extol the virtues of universal government-furnished health care, they say, when they have never had to use it.

Peter Huber in "Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine" in City Journal. The new age of "molecular medicine," of designer drugs for specific genetic defects, is going to break up the current system of government universal health care that Michael Moore so loves.

But Michael Moore and his slacker-liberal army would fight to the last mockumentary to stop that. They have a right to free and unlimited health care and they know it.

You might wonder why they make such a fuss. After all, Huber writes,"Three-dollar statins in New York in 1996 get 30-cent statins to London in 2006 and three-cent statins to Kuala Lumpur a few years later."

But that's not good enough for our progressive friends. They want three-cent statins now. Anything less is a triumph of greed over human need.

That's why it would be prudent not to place any bets on the end of socialized medicine any time soon.

Instead, we should expect it to lurch from one disaster to the next.

It's encouraging to think that Hillary Clinton is uniquely qualified, by education, temperament, experience, and plain dumb luck to be the US leader fated to test universal health insurance to destruction.

After she and her wrecking crew have finished then we can start to build a health care system that really works.

Meanwhile there is always medical tourism.