Some time ago, one of the little newspapers wrote a nice assessment of why little hospitals were being gobbled up. It had a lot to do with rising costs of higher technology, malpractice insurance, and lots of other things. Now that we are down to a few hospitals, Mission continues to get treated like the big bully when, according to my sources, it is smaller than the other two main players hiding behind the itty-biggy hospitals. And yet, news stories tell how happy the big hospitals are to partner. It is almost as if the powers that be have cast their fate to the wind of change (as in hope and centralized, socialized medicine). A chemistry teacher once described the process in a definition of entropy: Left to their own devices, everything goes to [Hades].