Wrong-Headed Planet

Now this may seen pretty stupid--which is probably because it is pretty stupid--but honestly one of my main reasons for staying on Copaxone (rather than switching to nothing) is the high cost of the medicine. This, you see, pays off the patient responsibility portion of my health plan, thus providing me with FREE prescriptions for the rest of the year--baclofen, gabapentin, ropinorile, lexapro, protonix, lortab, and last but certainly not least NuVigil, ringing in at $500 for 30 tiny pills!

I guess I'm just a terrible cheapskate, but there you have it. I just do not believe I could face paying $500 for 30 tiny pills. Just imagine how many packs of cigarettes I could get for the same price.

In addition, the fact that the prescriptions are FREE allows me to choke them down as quickly as allowed, and then go get another bagful of bottles without giving it a second thought, just as if I were picking apples off of someone else's tree.

This is called getting your money's worth. Isn't that how insurance makes us feel these days? Here we are suffering the constant burglary of our pocketbooks, and so of course if the chance arises to obtain an actual fair benefit from the exorbitant prices we pay, we jump on it, right? (This is meant to be a rhetorical question).

How often have you all experienced a disconnect between what your insurance calls full coverage and the bill that nonetheless shows up in your mail box? This involves a sort of math that is far beyond my figuring (though I will be the first to admit that I never was no good at math anyways).

But what I think is this--what I think is that the medical institutions, accounting for what the insurance will pay, simply raise their prices in response. It's something somehow akin to the way a car dealership works (think of the salesman in the movie Fargo).

This may seem unrelated (likely because it is), but did anyone read about that Russian cargo ship that mysteriously disappeared in the North Atlantic? It was there, and then gone, and no one has the foggiest idea what might have happened to it. This is a cargo ship, mind you, not a needle in a haystack. Would this make a good story line for a movie, or what? Oh, I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation, we just cannot see it for all the water and space in between.

Oh, and then there is the new found planet that orbits backwards. Yes. It's called WASP-17, and is about 1000 lights years away, give or take. The planet, as it seems, has it all wrong. It is a stubborn, senseless, backward planet.

That's one way to look at it. But how about this--how about maybe that one planet has it right, and all the rest of the known universe is whirling in the wrong direction? Who knows. What is common, after all, is not necessarily the same as what is proper.