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and pathology tests, and of course room and board in the hospital for a month. And perhaps most important, it included the loving care of the finest nurses we���d encountered anywhere. The total cost: $25,752. That ain���t chump change. But to put this in context, the cost of just 10 physical therapy sessions at New York���s Cornell University Hospital came to $27,000--greater than the entire bill from British Health Service! There is something seriously out of whack about 10 therapy sessions that cost more than a month���s worth of hospital bills in England. Still, while costs in U.S. hospitals might well have become exorbitant because of too few incentives to keep costs down, the British system has simply lost sight of costs and incentives altogether. (The exception would appear to be the few remaining private clinics in Britain. The heart procedure done in the private clinic in London cost about $20,000.) ���Free health care��� is a mantra that one hears all the time from advocates of the British system. But British health care is not ���free.��� I mentioned the cost of living in London, which is twice as high for almost any good or service as prices in Manhattan. Folks like to blame an overvalued pound (or undervalued dollar). But that only explains about 30 percent of the extra cost. A far larger part of those extra costs come in the hidden value-added taxes--which can add up to 40 percent when you combine costs to consumers and producers. And with salaries tending to be about 20 percent lower in England than they are here, the purchasing power of Brits must be close to what we would define as the poverty level. The enormous costs of socialized medicine explain at least some of this disparity in the standard of living. HYLAND 12