Late and Heavily Medicated

Ye gods, two weeks without a blog post.  You'd think I'd run out of things to say.  But hey, with Teddy Cruz running for President and various state legislatures trying to pass the usual batch of wacky stuff, there's no chance of that.  Here in Texas, for example, first-time legislator Molly White introduced a bill that said if the Supreme Court decided that same-sex marriage had to be allowed, it just wouldn't apply in Texas.  Yes, she really did that.  I'm not sure how anybody who didn't pass high-school civics got elected to public office, but hey, this is Texas.  Remember Molly Brown?  As in "the unsinkable" Molly Brown?  Well, some of us on Facebook have decided that anybody named Molly should have a nautical nickname.  So she's "Shipwreck" Molly White from here on out.  And Ted?  Maybe we should call him "Cruz the Canuck."  O Canada, our home and native land...

No, the real reason there hasn't been a blog post in two weeks is that I'm just tired.  For the first time in my life, I managed to come down with a simple cold (it usually morphs into a sinus infection, or sometimes bronchitis, and once pneumonia, just for variety).  So far this cold is staying a cold.  The other thing it's doing, though, is staying around.  I've had it for almost three weeks now, and yes, I do feel better every day, mostly, but it ain't gone yet and I am more than ready for it to go.  Couple that with some of the most stressful days I've ever had at work in my life (besides the Trial from Hell; there's some small comfort in knowing that it'll never be that bad again) and I'm ready to crawl under a rock and never blog again.

Of course my screaming fans, both of them, wouldn't stand for that.  So here I am.  And I need to spew about something, so tonight I'm going to spew about prescription drug prices.  Yep, prescription drug prices. No, I promise, this isn't on C-Span.  I take, let me see here, seven prescription drugs every day.  There are also two I take occasionally.  It's a very good thing I have insurance, because one of these suckers runs $981 a month without it.  Some of the others clock in at $385, $425, and one (this one I can't figure out) is only $2.42.  But what I'm saying is, they're pricey.  In fact, without insurance, if I were to add all the prices together, the total would be more than my take home pay.

More than my take home pay.  I kid you not.  Without insurance, I could not afford to live.  Even with insurance, it tops out around $250 a month, which is more than my gas bill, my water bill, my electric bill and a week's worth of groceries combined. It used to be even more than that, but I finally had The Talk with my doctor where I told him, "I can afford two of the three of these.  Pick two and I'll take those two."  And it's not like what I've got is ever going to go away.  Yep, I'm one of those Americans with a Chronic Condition.  Two of them, actually.  And if I were straight, I'd probably need birth control pills, on top of all of that.

People, chronic conditions are expensive.  Besides the cost of the drugs, which is by far the largest share of my health care expenses, I gotta see my doctor every month (at $50.00 a pop) and sometimes another doctor ($90.00 a session, but not every week anymore, thank God).  My wife, on the other hand, is taking five drugs that together run about $100 a month--after she meets her $750 deductible.  So hers are a little cheaper.  But we still add up the whole big ugly total at tax time to see if any of it comes back to us.  Guess what.  This year we made too much money.

Yeah, yeah,  I know.  Some cancer drugs run $100,000 a month.  When a new drug comes out it's gotta pay back its development costs.  If prescription drugs weren't so expensive, the entire U.S. economy would fall down a well.  But I get tired of hearing that.  Nobody asks to have a condition like this.  It's just fate, DNA, the dancing radiation in the air.  You're not a bad person if you come down with cancer, have a stroke or a heart attack, You healthy people out there, beware.  You're one car accident away from monthly trips to the pill mill.  So have good insurance. And don't vote for Ted.  Who, ironically, signed up for Obamacare today.  No, it's true. I saw it on CNN.