The health-care system of this country is a staggering enterprise, in any sense of the adjective. Whatever the failures of distribution and lack of co-ordination, it is the gigantic scale and scope of the total collective effort that first catches the breath, and its cost. The dollar figures are almost beyond grasping. They vary from year to year, always upward, ranging from something like $10 billion in 1950 to an estimated $115 billion in 1975, with much more to come in the years just ahead, whenever a national-health-insurance program is installed. The official guess is that we are now investing . . .