william schwartz: and the other is for non-acute care-- things such as dentistry... nursing home care, and over-the-counter drugs. now, that's scarcely mentioned as a factor contributing to the rapid rise in health-care costs. nursing homes, you hear mentioned, but this 45%, which includes all kinds of things-- research and psychologists and... opticians and... podiatrists and-- there's a huge list, it fills three pages-- that group of activities amounting to nearly 45% of health care is rising. why have the costs risen so precipitously? for one thing, the medical scene itself has changed. william schwartz: as a young physician just starting, i thought we were doing wonderful things. in retrospect, it's so clear to me now how limited we were. and none of us could have imagined the changes that have taken place between then and now. let me give you one example: in the old days, what would happen is, if you had undiagnosed abdominal pain, we did what was called an exploratory laparotomy, which means that you open the patient's abdomen from the top of his abdomen, from