U.S. policy seems to be to provide health care for anybody that needs it. I see the emergency rooms constantly filled with people. Many can't afford to pay, but they receive treatment. By law, hospitals MUST care for those who need care. They can't turn you away.

What happens when triage takes place? That's when limited resources are allocated to the neediest first. Someone assigns numbers to the patients in the waiting room: one, two, three. Now, obviously, someone could die when he/she is number six or eight or 10.

This is especially true in wartime. We saw scenes like this in M*A*S*H, when Alan Alda, as Hawkeye, acted as a doctor during wartime. They received incoming wounded, and they'd treat them according to need. Hawkeye once said he found it difficult to patch someone up only to send him back out to be killed.

I am going to have to get personal on some examples to show that sometimes someone does have to play God when triage is in effect.

Years ago, I suffered a miscarriage during the Kent State shootings. I was bleeding and trying to get into a doctor's office when a National Guardsman pointed a rifle at me from a rooftop and ordered me to go home.

I suffered a "spontaneous miscarriage" and was taken to the hospital. They gave me pain medication while I bled profusely, passing large clots. In fact, I was rather heavily sedated for three days while they attended to the shooting victims.

Somehow, I was relegated to a bed with four in a room; all of us had suffered miscarriages or threatened miscarriages, and we were set aside. They finally took me for surgery on the 4th morning.

Could anyone have saved a pregnancy if we had been treated more quickly? Who knows? However, someone made the decision.

When I took my elderly mother to the ER, she was in atrial fibrillation. We knew it because it had happened before. We had a sign-in chart. A man came out of the ER, looked at the chart, and said, Take that woman first, that woman 2nd (my mother), and a man third. I saw a lot people bleeding and in pain, but we went into a closed part of the ER, and my mother was treated within 20 minutes.

Someone played God.

A close friend has an alcoholic son. He overdosed on xanax and alcohol. They took him to the ER by ambulance and treated him. He went into a coma, but they brought him out of it. His liver showed damage and he was only 21. There was discussion of a liver transplant, but the doctors said he would not qualify, since

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