My highest thanks to @Gary Oswald for choosing this to be put on the blog.
Some scattered comments:
This was inspired by discussions of an early universal healthcare system in the United States, mostly in Alternate History Online.
This was written maybe a month before the accusations regarding sterilization of Latina women in an ICE detention center in Georgia broke. I remember feeling distraught that it happened but like Cassandra in that I somewhat predicted it. Why did it have to be like this? I could have been like those writers in the fifties that predicted smartphones, but no, I got to predict a crime against humanity.