My Own Personal Healthcare B.S.

So, my insurance company has told me that I can no longer take Lipitor™ for my hyperlipidemia. There is no generic (especially since Pfizer recently went to court to extend their patent a few more years) and it is very expensive. Even with insurance I was paying a dollar a pill for the stuff. BUT it works and it works really well. All my different cholesterol numbers look great, my liver enzymes are normal and I am not experiencing any aches and pains that can come from taking statin drugs. For me to continue to take Lipitor™, my doctor would have to petition my insurance company and give a reason why I need to be treated with Lipitor™ and not some generic equilovlent of some other statin drug.

Hopefully, whatever he puts me on works. If not, it will probably be a long, tortuous, trial and error experiment to find the right drug at the right dosage that keeps my cholesterol in check without making me feel like I've been hit by a truck or give me hepatitis.

Least Surprising Announcement Ever...

Sarah Palin has inked a multi-year deal with Fox News to be a regular contributor to the Fox News network. In other words, the crazy just keeps getting crazier. What I find amusing is that so many people thought Lou Dobbs was going to go to Fox when he quit CNN and that Palin was going to run for president when she quit Alaska - just the opposite turns out to be true. Well, it's not a known fact that Dobbs is actually running for any elected office but he certainly is throwing out enough clues that he might be running for some kind of elected office, like back-pedaling on his harsh anti-immigration stance in letters to several news outlets and notable bloggers.

According to the NY Times, Palin won't be on a regularly scheduled program but will host a series that runs on the network on an intermittent basis much like Oliver North (another ethically-challenged, dubious character who is also for some inexplicable reason held in high regard by the right.)

Avatar

The only experience to which I can liken watching Avatar is the very first time I saw Star Wars in the theater. It was amazing. It made me change what I perceive to be possible in movies.

Assassin by John Mayer

"I work in the dead of night
When the roads are quiet
No one is around
To track my moves

"Race in the end of lights
To find the gate is open
She's waiting in the room
I just slip on through

"You get in
You get done
And then you get gone
You never leave a trace or show your face
You get gone

"Should have turned around
And left before the sun came up again
But the sun came up again

"Enter the morning light
To find the day is burning the curtains and the wine
In a little white room
No, I'm not alone
Her head is heavy on me
She's sleeping like a child
What could I do?

"You get in
You get done
And then you get gone
You never leave a trace or show your face
You get gone

"Should have turned around
And left before the sun came up again
But the sun came up again

"I was a killer, was the best they'd ever seen
I'd steal your heart before you ever heard a thing
I'm an assassin and I had a job to do
Little did I know that girl was an assassin too

"Suddenly I'm in over my head and I could hardly breathe
Suddenly I'm floating over her bed and I feel everything
Suddenly I know exactly what I did, but I cannot move a thing
Suddenly I know exactly what I'd done and what it's gonna mean to me, mean to me
I'm gone

"I was a killer, was the best they'd ever seen
I'd steal your heart before you ever heard a thing
I'm an assassin and I had a job to do
Little did I know that girl was an assassin too

"She's an assassin
She's an assassin
She's an assassin
She's an assassin and she had a job to do"

It sounds like he's talking from experience...

#!*&~@!!!

It's amazing how pissed off I can be after being at work for only an half hour...

I wish I could...

...just remove myself from the problems of the world. Rush Limbaugh is thankfully recovering from his heart attack (or heart flutter or whatever landed him in the hospital). I may consider him to be a horrible, rotten person and one of the greatest contributors to the partisan deadlock that is hindering us from fixing the problems we are as a nation facing, but I do not wish him ill; I don't pray for his death. Having been discharged from the (I am assuming) private, VIP, suite at the hospital in Hawai'i where he was being cared for he had this pearl of wisdom to share: "Based on what happened to me here, I don't think there is one thing wrong with the American healthcare system. It is working just fine, just dandy." I should hope so with the amount of money Limbaugh has to toss around. For the average, working schlub it would mean possible lost wages, medications to buy after meeting a hefty yearly deductible and running the risk of having his health insurance coverage rescinded. For millions of other Americans out of work or unable to afford health insurance it would most likely mean financial ruin and possible bankruptcy due to insurmountable bills from the ER, the hospital, the surgeons, etc., lost time from work, missed mortgage payments, etc, etc...

For Rush to come out of the hospital and say this is akin to a hedge fund manager stating "The recession is an amazing opportunity to grab up some under-valued stocks and properties and thanks to all the TARP money we received we don't have to worry about liquidity and are allowed to take greater risks than normal." Meanwhile unemployment is 10%, average people are losing their homes and watching their lives and their children's futures evaporate. But AIG executives are complaining that a $500,000/year compensation without a bonus is simply too low a figure for them to accept...

It must be nice to live in their world.

Open foot, insert holier-than-thou foot...

Brit Hume should keep his mouth shut. If you're being paid by a "news" organization (and yes, the quotation marks are intentional) such as Fox News as a senior political commentator then talk about politics. I wouldn't accidently tune into Access Hollywood and expect vapid Billy Bush talking about say, Jim DeMint blocking the appointment of the head of the TSA during a failed terrorist attempt. So, Brit Hume should not take it upon himself to comment on the Tiger Woods infidelity debacle:

"Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think, is a very open question. And it's a tragic situation .... But the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, seems to me to depend on his faith.

"He's said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'"

So...? Is the implication that because he is a Buddhist he is somehow automatically morally inferior? (How did that work out for Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker?) ...or is the implication that, in Mr. Hume's "expert" opinion that Buddhism is inferior or flawed? Even if that is his (or your) opinion, a person's faith is between him and God and should not be the topic of conversation on a network "news" station by a political analyst. Or any television show for that matter, unless you choose to live your life in the public eye.