I have a few more weeks here before driving home to Colorado for the summer, but every day the news here gets worse and worse, and I might leave early.

The whole town is still stirred up over the big health problem where 40,000 people were potentially exposed to hepatitis and HIV through re-use of syringes and medicine vials at a big endoscopy clinic. Everyday the front page of the newspaper introduces us to more victims or reveals new problems.

Of course the lawyers are in hog heaven - the newspaper is full of advertisements encouraging people to sue someone, and there are even ads for doctors to hire lawyers to protect them from lawsuits. And you know there are television ads like crazy for lawyers to go with all the ones about suing after a car accident. I think 80% of the Las Vegas TV ads are for lawyers.

The rest of the doctors in town, 177 of them, took out a full-page ad in the paper to tell people they are not like these bad doctors and they still care and know what they are doing.

Aside from the current health scare, though, is the long-term problem that there is an extreme shortage of medical personnel in this town. Nevada is 47th in the nation for its ratio of doctors to citizens: 161 doctors for every 100,000 citizens - the national average is 256 to 100,000. Nevada is ranked 50th in the number of nurses per capita, and 49th in the number of hospital beds per 100,000 people.

The doctor shortage is mostly in the area of primary care physicians. It seems like there are plenty of specialists - plastic surgery, etc. and the trauma care is ranked pretty high, but don't come here and get sick or old. Our health insurance is based in Colorado - there are very few private insurers in Nevada, and two of them just merged, so there are fewer and fewer choices. Our private health insurance is issued in Colorado, so if we need medical care, we have to wait for summer when we are living in that state.