"Health care is sick in St. Louis."

The crumbling of the nation's public health care system is nowhere better illustrated than in St. Louis, Mo., where the city administration recently removed its ailing municipal hospital and clinics from public control in one quick, autocratic stroke. Helping the mayor "rescue" St. Louis "out of the health care business" were the city's business elite and the highly paid managers of National Medical Enterprises, one of the nation's largest for-profit health care corporations. The St. Louis story is just one local chapter of an unfolding tragedy which finds the poor and uninsured increasingly shut out and shunted aside as the nation's public and voluntary health sectors fall prey to what is euphemistically called "privatization."