This weekend I received a letter from Blue Shield, my insurer, telling me that two weeks ago they terminated their contract with my health care provider and hospital. Yes, that's correct--they told me two weeks after the fact, leaving me and countless others scrambling to figure out where to go for health care, and whether their care during the previous two weeks had been covered. Being strongly attached to my doctor (who is also my son's doctor), I got on the internet to see if I couldn't just switch health insurance companies. I soon discovered that as woman of documented child-bearing abilities, I (or, more accurately, my employer) would need to shell out a lot of cash to get insured.

Before panicking, I phoned a state agency called the "Department of Managed Care" (and if this sounds like it's straight out of Kafka to you, you're not the only one) to get their take on the situation. And that's when they told me that insurers and providers often have these "spats," terminate contracts, and then renegotiate, a process that can take months. In other words, they are playing chicken--although in this case, the victims are neither the hospitals nor the insurance company, but patients.