There’s an old joke about socialism that goes if the socialists took over the Sahara desert today, there’d be a shortage of sand tomorrow. Socialism has never worked anywhere — ever.

It is perhaps the worst invention of mankind, having killed more people, destroyed more cultures and ruined more economies over the last century than all the wars of that same period combined. It is the plague of political ideologies.

And yet we continue to come back to it. It’s like we just manage to get all the evils of Pandora’s box stuffed back in when someone comes along thinking he’s smarter than everyone else and flips the lid again.

Medicare is a mess. It is going broke. In fact, it is broke. It is kept alive by shifting a good portion of its costs to private insurance. Everyone who pays for their own private insurance in this country subsidizes Medicare.

They also support fraud! Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of Medicare’s expenditures are eaten up by fraud. That would be between $40 and $80 billion a year!

And now we plan to heave this tragic comedy onto the rest of medicine. Ask yourself this: How will this new mega-Medicare survive when there is no private medical insurance to support it?

Medicare at present spends something like $400 billion a year. If you took all of the money of all the richest people in this country, you could run Medicare for maybe a couple of years. Then what?

Apparently, medical care is just too important to be left in the hands of the private world. Well, food is more important! Let’s socialize food production and distribution first.

Oh, but what happens every time a country tries this? The people running the government get fat and everyone else starves.

George Edward Martinez

Milledgeville