No, that's not what I meant. Poor medical care or lack of access to it can put everyone at risk. Money won't save you.

No matter how much money one has, when the emergency rooms are backed up because they are full of illnesses that can and should have been prevented with regular checkups or basic care, your care will suffer, too. And you can't fix overcrowded emergency rooms without addressing the reason that they're overcrowed is that it's the only place most poor people can afford to go for care when all else fails and they or their kids are very ill.

Decent access to medical care is very much a public concern. A smallpox outbreak is an extreme example, but diseases like measles and the flu and chickenpox cause deaths every year because of lack of basic medical care.

But it'll take a terrorist event like a smallpox epidemic to get most politicians to take a public health threat seriously. Caught early, smallpox can be fairly easily contained because it isn't contagious yet. But it won't be caught early, if it happens, because it'll be some poor schlepp on the subway that gets infected.