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 his chest, all the way to the pelvis. and then the surgeon-- and i don't mean this critically, really-- but they had to poke around through the whole abdomen, feeling each organ to see if you could find something that was abnormal. mostf the time it wasn't rth doing, because the risk/pain factor overrode the likelihood of finding anything, particularly if t likelihood... was remote-- retively remote. wellthink of what's happened. we'll go ahead and do an mri or a ct because it's non-invasive, and the patient is rllt put through anything terribly unpleasant-- a little claustrophobic perhaps. so the upshot is there's a number of examinations with the new technology... has incread enormously... despite the fact that the produre is much less expensive than the one that we've managed to eliminate. in the 1950s, health expenditures comprised 5% or less of gross domestic expenditures in the united states. toda