The very title - “Expensive Medical and Surgical Technology” - expresses in coded form a myth that is widely prevalent among those who consider the political and economic aspects of health care. Strangely, it is a myth that finds favor mainly at the extreme ends of the range of attitudes toward health care. Monetarists see it as an incentive toward increasing private provision of health care, while extreme egalitarians see it as another example of unjust privilege. The content of the myth is that there is a definable group of costly procedures, which can somehow be isolated from the general practice of medicine and surgery, after which such procedures can either be made the subject of special private provision or, alternatively, discarded from a rationed system of health care.