> no one can afford socialized medicine

You *can* have social medicine, but you have to treat people a bit more like farm animals - meaning when someone is going to become endlessly costly to keep alive, you kill them.

But this "mercy killing" concept brings up a bunch of ugly eugenics type discussions that breaks the "nation of equals".

Traditionally, the US had commercial medicine where you can spend millions or even billions of dollars to keep someone alive past when they naturally should have died. Isn't Rockefeller on like his 8th heart transplant?

So socialized medicine countries are trying to walk a tightrope of implementing something like #1 without admitting it.