Back In the Saddle Again

No, I haven't been loafing, I've been a bit under the weather the past few days. That's the way it goes when you get to be my age. If it isn't one damn thing it's another and there isn't a thing you can do about this unwritten rule that says that as soon as one little ailment departs another must come along to take its place.

Sometimes I think it's a game that weary old bodies enjoy playing. First the digestive system decides to act up just a wee bit, then the kidneys think its time for another infection and as soon as that's over anemia decides to make even the slightest effort seem like a 30 mile hike with full field pack. And on and on it goes. But as they say, I guess it beats the alternative. Sometimes I wonder about that, though.

For a while I was getting a weekly shot of something called Procrit. If you believe the TV commercials it makes a person with one foot in the grave leap up and go water skiing or take off running along the beach like a kid of 16. The fact is it didn't affect me quite that way but some kind of test showed that I had improved so much that I only got a shot once a month. Then not at all because the nurse in charge of this operation said, "The government wants you to feel good, but not too good."

The government was paying for this Procrit, as you may have surmised. Darn good thing, too, because when I asked one day the doctor said it costs $2,000 per shot. Had it been coming out of my pocket they would have had to start selling it one drop at a time.

Now if some ignorant fool of a layman would suggest that $2,000 for a shot of clear liquid in a container an inch long seems a mite excessive the entire pharmaceutical industry would jump in to give him a hundred reasons why that's a fair price. Those boys stick together. Just about everybody has seen the ads they run every hour or so on TV pointing out that the Indianapolis Star and a few other newspapers say the Medicare prescription drug plan is working just fine so don't let the federal government mess with it. It was the federal government that set it up in the first place, of course, and even an ignorant fool can see that much because it's about as screwball a program as a group of people could come up with. But it is working just fine - for the pharmaceutical companies. The rest of us, they say, should make sure the government doesn't mess it up by allowing even more generic drugs into the program. After all, fair is fair so we wouldn't want to allow anything to happen that would make the pharmaceutical boys unhappy.

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