Yeah, sure, Ake. Just take it easy.

Okay, Little Hawk. I agree with your list of particulars. But the problem is that there are people who want to take all those things away from people and store the money to, say, pay for someone's heart operation, in their own Swiss bank accounts—and to hell with the poor sod whose heart just quits on him because he couldn't afford the necessary medical care.

It's easy to sat back and enumerate "wouldn't it be a nice world ifs," and indeed it would be nice—in fact a life necessity for some people—but there are people out there who don't see it that way at all. They want to do away with what they call "entitlement programs" (completely forgetting what the word "entitlement" means) such as Social Security and Medicare, which people have paid into all their working lives and which many older people have to rely on to pay the bills and see to their medical needs.

You folks in Canada and the UK have national health care programs in place, so you don't have to sweat it. But the elderly lady who lives upstairs takes a tumble, fractures her pelvis, and winds up in a hospital for several weeks (and I have a specific person in mind that this happened to), racking up many tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills—how is she going to pay for that if they take her "entitlements" away, as some people want to do?

She is entitled to have that covered because she paid for it all her working life.

It's just "academic" to you guys. But it was pretty damned real to her!!

So don't sweat it. Just sit back, take it easy, and kibbitz all you want. Ebbie and I will save your sorry asses.

Don Firth