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 bung to the rapid rise in health-care costs. nursing homes, you ar mentioned, but this 4, icincludes all kinds things-- researndsychologists and... opticns and. podiatrists and-- the'a geist, it fills three pag-- th group of activi 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 cle to me n how limited we wer annone of could ha imagined the changes th have takeplace between thennd now. t me give u e ample: 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 his chest, all the way to the pelvis. and then the surgeon-- and i don't mean this critically, really-- but the