Imagine walking across the parking lot of your supermarket. You come upon a man rolling around in agony, clutching his chest. Through teeth clenched in pain, he says, “An elephant! There is an elephant sitting on my chest.”

You step over him, muttering to your spouse, “Must be having a heart attack. Interesting. I’ve never heard anyone actually say that. The books use it as a classic complaint, but to actually hear it? Interesting. But how crass to collapse here, in the middle of the parking lot.”

You continue into the supermarket to buy your organic vegetables, angry at the man’s having inconvenienced you but not particularly concerned about his plight.

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A Republican President vetoed a bill initiated by a bipartisan Senate compromise and propelled by Republican effort to provide health insurance to 10 million low-income uninsured children.

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I am not a great fan of rankings and statistics. They can be a bit irrelevant as Robert Boynton pointed out when he observed, “statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during the wartime.” Thus, it was with a jaundiced eye that I considered U.S. News & World Report’s recent ranking of American health plans (November 5, 2007).

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Assume for a moment that you know nothing about medicine. You have a headache that has become intolerable. It is unrelenting. You’ve had it for week. It began as mild ache at the back of your neck, but you initially paid little attention to it. You had spent a long day at your computer working on an important project with an imminent deadline. You often finished such days with what you called “computer neck.” No big deal.