I encourage you all to take a look at Robin Hanson's writings. He's a futurist with a cornucopia of ideas, some of them crazy, almost all of them very interesting. For instance, he proposes a system where we "buy health, not health care." I don't know about its feasibility, but it's fun to ponder. For a while now, I've read his stuff on various occasions when I wanted to kick back. For members of the policy wonk species of the nerd genus, Hanson's essays have the leisure value of a good short story.