In another example of the way spiraling health-care costs are not being faced but aggressively shuffled from place to place, some of the orthopedic surgeons who practice, or used to practice, at IHC's Cottonwood Hospital are upset that the health-care giant has been forcing them to pull shifts in the emergency room.

It's not the extra work and long hours the docs object to, they say, but the fact that ER patients are much more likely than the general population to be uninsured or otherwise unable to pay for the care they receive.

As a nonprofit institution that prides itself on providing tons of charity care, IHC may think that's business as usual. But the doctors object to being forced into providing charity care of their own, not to mention adding to their risk of malpractice suits.

IHC counters, with reason, that pulling an ER shift is just something that goes with the territory of being a doctor and that it would be unreasonable, and unaffordable, for IHC to pay the doctors' fees itself.

While the doctors and the hospital managers feud, painting one another as greedy, both are too busy to turn around and look at the real villain of the piece: the whole American system of funding health care. The system that abandons millions of Americans to the tender mercies of the medical profession. The system that is not only bankrupting the working classes, but also their employers.

We read that General Motors is in lousy financial shape, and that the primary reason is the staggering weight of health-care costs for its 1.1 million workers, retirees and their families.

Again, though, instead of taking its What's-Good-For-General-Motors-Is-Good-For-America clout to Washington and demanding that this country provide the kind of national health care that relieves GM's European and Japanese rivals of such a burden, the company is trying to get the money out of the hide of its unionized workers.

Again, the health-care system plays divide and conquer. And the plague spreads.