Now go read the book “The Blade Runner” by Alan E. Nourse. It talks about the abuses suffered by the population when gov’t controls health care. The description from Wiki below pretty much has the plot right.
Given that we just had to suffer through what the gov’t did during a plague Nourse had it right too.
Plot
The novel’s protagonist is Billy Gimp, a man with a club foot who runs “blades” for Doc (Doctor John Long) as part of an illegal black market for medical services. The setting is a society where free, comprehensive medical treatment is available for anyone so long as they qualify for treatment under the Eugenics Laws. Preconditions for medical care include sterilization, and no legitimate medical care is available for anyone who does not qualify or does not wish to undergo the sterilization procedure (including children over the age of five). These conditions have created illegal medical services in which bladerunners supply black market medical supplies for underground practitioners, who generally go out at night to see patients and perform surgery. As an epidemic breaks out among the underclass, Billy must save his city from the plague.
The Bladerunner (also published as The Blade Runner) is a 1974 science fiction novel by Alan E. Nourse, about underground medical services and smuggling. It was the source for the title, but no major plot elements, of the 1982 film Blade Runner, adapted from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick,[1] though elements of the Nourse novel recur in a pair of films also largely adapted from Dick's work, "Impostor" and "Minority Report", released in 2001 and 2002, respectively.