Thank you for posting that.

I live in Billings, MT, and we made the national news a few times for our "overrun" hospital here. (I think Walter Kirn was probably talking about Bozeman as that's more where the writers settle.) Of course, the locals would have told you there are two big hospitals in Billings. One of them was "overrun" and one of them wasn't, and the truth, the locals would have told you, was that the one that was "overrun" was a nightmare before COVID because of staffing shortages and a drive for profit over patient care and that it is frequently "overrun" during flu season. My further frustration is that we desperately need a conversation on our overpriced dangerous joke of a medical system in this country and the fact that it sucks us dry financially and can't even handle a small bump in need. But, no, instead we yell about vaccines and masks and never mention that the other hospital in town, the one that actually takes on indigent cases and therefore is often busier, was holding its own even in the worst of it, and discussing why that was and what we could take from it to improve the system overall. Instead the local newspaper seemed to literally forget that we had two hospitals and turned into a PR team for the one and then the story went national.