For M, going to the emergency room with a migraine might get him an Imitrx pill or shot, and if he gets a sympathetic doctor he might go home with some samples. I suspect he would feel obligated to pay for the visit rather than just dumping the cost onto everyone else, so it would probably wind up being a $1,000 pill. The ER won’t do a blood workup to check for rheumatoid arthritis, no matter what the president says, and they won’t treat it, either, although they would treat the pain if he walks in screaming.

In short, equating the ER with access to health care is not a sound response to the problem.

EMTALA. Look it up. Congress gave those “personal instructions”. It’s the law.

I’m working on that positivity thing. I’m thinking something about the great apple pies one can get on the way to the desert will do the trick.

And now it’s all used up, six months into the year, because the chiropractor was mistaken – his services are NOT physical therapy but office visits, so are included in that $2,000. As with the doctor – who charged Aetna $172 for an office visit so he could get $90 out of them – the chiropractor overcharged impressively, about three times the amount he wanted to get. So a few visits to the chiropractor later and I’m out of coverage. I can still get up to $20,000 for hospitalization, for which I imagine the hospital would bill Aetna $40,000 to $60,000. Sounds like racketeering to me. How about you?

Meanwhile, I found I’ve been paying market rates for my prescriptions. I discovered this when I renewed a prescription with Aetna Rx Home Delivery and they raised the price from $175 to $295 without telling me. They refused to take the medication back and refund my money, so now it’s in dispute resolution (I hope) with Visa, and I’m ordering from Canada for half the price of the generic here (free shipping!). Another medication (Imitrex – about $20 per pill) is unavailable as a generic in the U.S., so I’m getting it from Canada for about one-third the price.

My only immediate quandary is what to do about the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis I’m getting in my hands at too young an age. It runs in the family. The definitive blood test costs hundreds of dollars, to be added to office visits and (if needed) medication to keep my joints from being destroyed. I don’t know exactly what to do. Call my mom, I guess – though she might say something like, “Well, that disease is on your father’s side of the family. Call him. No, I don’t know his number.” She’s a Republican, has free government-paid coverage stemming from his military service.

Getting another policy before this one expires would cost me a minimum of $600 a month, and it wouldn’t cover my wife. Adding her would bring the cost to about half the mortgage payment, and since she doesn’t have insurance now, we’d have to pay maybe $12,000 for the first year’s coverage plus the costs of her office visits and treatments before she gets over the pre-existing-conditions hump.

What a country. Here’s a suggestion for our mutual mental health: Write something positive, substantially positive, about the U.S. because, when I think about politics based on bribery, health noncare, celebrity worship, the ascent of Liberty University law school graduates to positions of power, and the corporate state (just for starters), I kinda forget why I want to live here.