Linking this with terrorism might be a little over the top, but I see what Larry's getting at. 2,700+ people are killed when the World Trade Center is attacked by terrorists, and it swamps the news for weeks and it turns the whole country in a new direction. 18,000 people die per year, but since they don't do it all at once, in a group, and there's no loud bang, the news doesn't cover it at all and nobody much seems to be concerned. When the richest country in the world doesn't have a national health service (and you can hardly call Medicare and Medicaid a "national health service;" it's better than nothing, but it's ridiculously inadequate), sick folks are not the only thing that's sick.

Here's another tidbit: I can't remember which program I saw it on (one of the TV news magazines, like 60-Minutes), but a week or so ago they ran a story about hospital emergency rooms around the country shutting down.

People without health insurance often don't go to a doctor when they are sick simply because they can't afford to. They try to tough it out, take two aspirin, go to bed, and hope they'll be better in the morning. Then they wind up really sick. They head for the emergency room, to be told that they are seriously ill, which they would not have been had they sought medical care when the condition first came on. It would have been far less expensive to take care of then, but now they are in for some really serious medical expense. Assuming the person survives, more often than not they wind up deeply in debt and are never able to pay it off. As a result, the hospital just has to eat it. This situation is on the increase, and the costs to hospitals running emergency rooms are often more than the hospital cares to contend with.   So many hospitals around the country are shutting them down.

Now, where does the sick person go?

Don Firth