Not the film based on Do Angels Dream of Electric Sheep, but The Bladerunner, a 1974 novel by Alan Nourse. In some near future, good health care is provided to anyone who agrees to pay the fee - sterilization. Those who don't want to comply with these terms are forced to turn to black market practitioners. The idea is to weed out those who have genetic diseases or those with less immune resistance, allowing the rest to breed healthier, stronger children. Truly deadly epidemics, however, choose victims indiscriminately regardless of healthcare choices. The book is really a cautionary tale about the dangers of "socialized" or two tier medical systems.

I suppose in the the early 70's, this doomsday prediciton may have sounded like a pile of invisible cymbals making an unnecessary din, or communist evil. But substitute "lots of money" in place of sterilization and "HMO/single payer/insurance" for government medical center and Nourse's book is amazingly prescient. Some of these fears have become founded - a two class system of those who have and don't have healthcare, "free" clinics = black market, mutated man-made super virus, children with poor immune defense systems, etc. We have yet to see if nationalized healthcare will produce such a staggering social program like the one in The Bladerunner, but we know that China ran such an experiment for a long time. To think of this story loosely and in global terms is important because disease is transmitted in exactly that way.