Ronnie Musgrove

As for my state of Mississippi, our governor, Phil Bryant, said the state could not afford the matching funds required to trigger the federal match for Medicaid expansion. We won't do it even though in 2014, the federal government would pay over $50 for every one dollar Mississippi chips in.

Conservatives are telling elected leaders that expansion of Medicaid comes at a moral - or more overtly, a political - price. At what price are they willing to go back on years of proclaiming 'socialized medicine' as the slippery slope to 'rationing of health care,' 'death panels' and other claims far too gruesome to mention in polite company?

To ask questions can become the laziest and wobbliest occupation of a mind, but when you must yourself answer the problem that you have posed, you will meditate your question with care and frame it with precision.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.