Health care keeps popping up in the movie.
Jack Nicholson plays an obsessive-compulsive romance novelist who slowly falls in love with a waitress played by Helen Hunt. She s the single mother of a son whose asthma is out of control, forcing the two of them to seek care through the emergency department. There s also a neighbor, a gay artist played by Greg Kinnear, who gets assaulted in a home robbery and is forced to move in with Nicholson s character because of astronomical hospital bills. The audience applauded Hunt s character for her attack on managed care. She says the HMO has been withholding treatment her son needs, not doing appropriate lab tests and not solving his problems.