Let's not forget yet another casualty of the Wall Street meltdown: health care reform.

Sacramento bureaucrats were swept up in (or swept away by) Gov. Schwarzenegger's epic health-reform concepts earlier this year, which dissolved in the multi-billion-dollar magma of deficits. Surprise: Instead, there were health care cuts, some of which are still being fought in court. (Too late for those made jobless at hospitals in Visalia, Corcoran and elsewhere.)

On Sept. 24, the Kaiser Family Foundation released its latest health coverage survey with its President and CEO Drew Altman saying the Wall Street rescue makes overhauling the nation's pinky-in-the-dike coverage system much more difficult. Or, put another way, as one newspaper quoted New America Foundation economist Len Nichols, "the cost of doing nothing is high and growing."

A few quick stats from the survey:

• Most employer-sponsored health plans have a three- or four-tier system for determining how much workers pay for prescriptions -- the most costly being lifestyle drugs (must be those wonderful ED or constipation ads we see on TV during dinner).
• 31% of large companies offer health benefits to retirees, compared with 66% in 1988.
• 14% of companies said they were very likely to raise workers premium contributions in the coming year, and 12% said they were very likely to restrict eligibility or eliminate coverage altogether.

At a recent hospital association conference in San Francisco, one hospital CEO told me, essentially, we do too good a job of caring for people in desperate financial times (theirs and ours) when others (maybe like airlines, automakers, bankers, mortgage lenders?) wheedle a bailout from  governments.

What was the John Cougar Mellencamp song, "Hurt So Good"? Right.