Free I’m free at last!

Today marks the first day of freedom from Express Scripts.

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Can I get a hallelujah!

No longer will I be forced into using generic drugs if I don’t want to. It’s once again my choice to manage MY own prescription world.

I once again can go to the LOCAL pharmacy. Where I can ask a pharmacist questions and know that I’ll actually be talking to someone that knows what the fuck they’re talking about.

No more talking to a moron on a telephone who obviously couldn’t give a shit about what they’ve sent, where they sent it, or that what they sent isn’t the right shit in the first place.

The down side is that I’ll be paying through the nose but that’s better than having to fight the fucking insurance company every time I need something.

Even if I was paying for a prescription out of pocket… I ended up wasting time (mine and the pharmacy staff) because I’d call in a prescription and the insurance assholes would override my request.

Then I’d go to the pharmacy and have to have the pharmacist take back the generic shit that doesn’t work on my body to replace it with the shit I wanted in the first place and was willing to pay cash for.

Generic drugs, with a different chemical make up aren’t the same as the real deal. Generics may work in a similar fashion but maybe not as well, that’s often why the generic was superseded in the first place.

Remember having to take an antibiotic 6 times a day? Now it’s not unusual to have a prescription antibiotic that you only have to take once a day and the new drug doesn’t give you the shits either.

Let me see… I have to take a handful of pills 6 times a day and I’ll need to have a diaper or I can take one pill a day and go on with my life without scoping out where the nearest toilet is.

UHH let me have option fucking B!

Now I can choose generics if they make sense and they’re effective otherwise I can pay for non generic and know the shit will work.

Yaaaahhhhooooo!

I’m fully aware that I may not be so thrilled the first month I get the bill. But at least I have freedom of choice instead of being told cheerfully that since a generic version of the drug I’d been taking for years was now available I would be forced to accept the generic. Oh and you’ll have to have your doctor jump through hoops to get that prescription filled.

With Express Scripts in my rear view mirror perhaps at least one portion of my life will get a little simpler.

If your HR department happens to mention Express Scripts as an option during your next open enrollment… Tell them in no uncertain terms you refuse.

Believe me if a conference room full of people say something like “We’re quitting if you force us to deal with that prescription coverage company” your HR people will probably listen.

In my case, I asked questions but the majority of the folks in the room just wanted to get through the presentation. After 3 years dealing with Express Scripts those same folks welcomed being laid off. We’d all had similar stories of horrific dealings with Express Scripts.

The classic was the guy whose meds had to be kept cold. Express Scripts sent his stuff in an uninsulated paper envelope in February to Los Angeles. At the time it was in the 80s and the drugs were ruined.

When he called Express Scripts asking for a replacement and explaining what happened the Express Script people told him its Winter, “We don’t ship in insulated packaging in Winter.” After Express Scripts had screwed up 3 consecutive shipments they finally sent him to his local pharmacy.

Good riddance to a fucked up company with a shitty customer service philosophy. Hello to freedom…

This makes me wonder…

woodward… How many more lies the Obama administration is selling and just how compromised the media is when it comes to the Obama White House.

This morning I caught a couple of Tweets about Bob Woodward being under attack from the Media and one tweet said he’d been threatened by the White House over a story.

I thought Whoa!!!! Something is up.

In this case Woodward is at the center of a journalistic feeding frenzy of his so called colleagues.Woodward is famous for breaking the Watergate story and I’ve always enjoyed his writing, so I started trying to track down what the whole story is.

Mr. Woodward’s crime is that he pointed out, the Emperor has no clothes.

He caught the White House red handed in a bald lie. Then he published what he found.

In this case contrary to the White House spin, Which has been saying  that Congress and specifically the Republicans are responsible for the upcoming sequester

According to Woodward, the truth is that the Sequester was suggested and approved by the Obama administration.

This isn’t the first time Mr. Woodward has caught the White House in a lie… I seem to recall President Nixon resigning as a direct result of a Woodward story. At least Mr. Woodward is non partisan!

The whole article from The Washington Post is Here.

An interesting analysis of the feeding frenzy and comments from the “Balanced Media” can be found on Breitbart Here.

The upcoming cuts, according to Breitbart represent only 2% of the Federal budget.

Yet the Federal government is asking it’s employees to take furlough days that will account for a loss in their paychecks of as much as 5%.

I’m a “whats good for the goose is good for the gander kind of guy” and think if the Government expects their employees to accept a 5% cut in pay, then the government shouldn’t be bitching about a lousy 2% loss in theirs.

It’s a foregone conclusion that the people furloughed are folks can least afford a 5% pay cut.

They’ll be used as poster children demonstrating the evil that the bastard Republicans have caused. It will be the secretaries, clerks, phone operators, and maintenance people.

The management and the politicians themselves will not be losing at all.

Why would the furloughs be concentrated in those areas? So that the American people have the false impression that the sequester really is doing something that’s hurting average Americans.

I’d bet you that 2% of the Federal budget is toilet paper and office supplies. ( I might lose that bet but I wouldn’t be surprised with all the waste in govt. if the cost was that high. I’m sure they’re using $10 rolls of TP in Congress.)

Unfortunately, the story has become Woodward, instead of the lies and misrepresentations from the White House.

According to this NPR piece  Woodward has described a contentious conversation he had with a White House aide wherein the aide yelled at Woodward for a half hour, then followed up with an “Apology” email that said, “You’ll regret staking out that claim”.

Woodward said, “I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in,”.

And he’s right.

It may be overstating it to say that this was a direct threat from the White House with the full backing of the President.

But in times like these, when the President can make you a terrorist by simply calling you a terrorist, and when your travel can be impeded because your name or someone with a similar name appears on a no-fly list.

Woodward’s discomfort may have more basis in fact than paranoia.

I think it’s very unfortunate that the real story has been eclipsed by the sidebar.

On the positive side of the scale is that we clearly can see just how deep the color yellow of “Yellow journalism” in America has become.

I find myself asking if this had been a Bush Administration gaffe… Had Mr. Woodward caught former President Bush in a similar lie, would Mr. Woodward have been a hero?

Sadly, I think the answer is that he’d have been a media darling.

President Obama and his administration are just as likely to lie, misrepresent, and abuse power as any other administration.

The old saying, “Power corrupts…” is just as applicable to a Black President as it is to a White one.

I  often find myself asking, Is President Obama getting special treatment because of racism? Is the media still laboring under some misguided guilt that an African American needs “Special” treatment?

If the people who are supposed to be the publics watchdogs are in fact spinning the news, if they’re reporting only one side of the Obama Presidency – that President Obama can do no wrong… We lose objectivity.

With that loss of objectivity we also lose our ability to question, formulate, or even express differing opinions.

It’s ironic as hell that the first amendment could in fact be undone by the very people operating most under it’s protections. Bundled in that irony is that journalists will devour their own for exercising freedom of speech.

Bad habits

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I used to smoke. 

Yeah, I was a smoker. I was the evil puffing bastard everyone has come to hate! I put your children at risk! According to the nanny state I should have been taken out and shot.

Not to put me out of my misery but out of yours.

I quit years ago and I still miss it.

Now theres an un-PC admission in this day & age!

I’m glad I quit and everything, but I liked the nicotine rush! I also liked that it killed my appetite and it was a lot easier to stay skinny.

The health benefits outweighed the desire to smoke and so I was able to leave it, albeit with regret in my past.

I quit because my best friend asked me one day how it was that I could justify going to the gym 4 days a week and still smoke when I came out of the gym?

It was a good question and as usual his logic was completely irrefutable.

I quit that day…

I still miss it.

I miss smoking when I’m drinking at a bar. You can’t smoke at bars in California anymore but I still miss it.

I miss smoking after sex. I miss the ashtray on my belly, the red cherry of my cigarette glowing in the darkness and me thinking quietly about what I’d just done and knowing that I was going to do it again when I stubbed out my smoke. I miss having my arm wrapped around my partner, their head on my shoulder while I smoked that in between fuck cigarette.

I doubt I’m the only man who feels that way.

I miss getting up from my desk and walking outside to have a smoke and bitch with my co-workers about the boss or the latest political fuck-up in the company.

I smoked because I enjoyed the taste, and the hit. Not because I was lured into it by unscrupulous corporations. (Their ads were enticing, who didn’t want to be the Marlboro Man?)  I knew damn well what I was doing.

My Dad smoked. It killed him, you’d think that I wouldn’t wax lovingly about cigarettes.

I didn’t start smoking until I was 18. Near the end of my smoking days, I was doing almost a pack a day.

The nicotine was one thing. I think I was self medicating a bit. Nicotine acts as a stimulant and because it’s a stimulant it has a very specific effect on persons who happen to have been treated in their childhood with drugs like Ritalin.

The child may have outgrown the reasons they were put on Ritalin but their bodies will always have an affinity for stimulants in general.

I’ve known more than one smoker who had been on Ritalin in their childhood, of those more than a few who really liked pharmaceutical grade stimulants. 

Interesting thing is that if their Doctor was smart and recognized certain traits they’d end up back on Ritalin and suddenly they’d stop smoking.

But sure… Ritalin is completely safe for your unruly child, we’ve been using it for 50 years on kids just like yours… (with no or generally undocumented, unproven ill effects.)

Moving on…

I recently had the opportunity to try one of those e-cigarettes. For those of you that don’t know, these are things that look like cigarettes and that provide a nice flavor and optionally a selectable hit of nicotine without the tar, and other nasty chemicals associated with combustion in a “real” cigarette.

It was nice…

Not exactly like smoking a cigarette, but it was pleasant.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of reading and investigation The jury is out about the negative effects of these devices.

About the only consistent thing is that they’re less unhealthy than a cigarette. The “Smoke” is essentially water vapor, there’s no smell, but there is a good taste (at least in the one I tried). You can choose the nicotine leveNewImagel and they’re also a lot cheaper than cigarettes. 

I’m not sure that I’m ready to start up with one of these things all the time but I do like the option.

The only problem I could see is that unlike a real cigarette you don’t know when you’re done. 

I’d smoke a real cigarette in about 10 -15 minutes if I wasn’t in a hurry. These e-cigs don’t burn down so you could find yourself completely losing track of time if you weren’t paying attention.

For someone like me that really enjoyed smoking even when I quit… these things might be a neat option. I could also see how they might assist in quitting for some people.

But I suspect that there will be a larger number of folks who switch over to this option. At least until the government starts to regulate them and drives the prices up to normal cigarette levels.

There’s also the fact that cigarettes used to be, and e-cigs still are cheaper than a monthly prescription of Ritalin.

I don’t know if that’s still the case. I haven’t looked into Ritalin in a very long time.

The last Paraprosdokian

This Fridays Paraprosdokian was the last one queued.

20130222-092710.jpgIt’s funny, when I created all of them last year I though “dang it’s going to take forever for these to be used up. I hope they don’t bore people.”

Yet here we are, they’re done and I don’t really have a good idea about what to use to replace them, or even if they should be replaced.

It’s been weird, the last few weeks, I’ve been less & less interested in doing anything. I feel really bored and yet I should be pushing hard on a couple of fronts.

It’s like my drive has left me and even succeeding at things like securing insurance brings me no satisfaction.

Arguably, obtaining insurance should have made me feel better because it represented a victory against what I had come to feel was an unfair system.

The system is still unfair and it should be burned down and replaced with something that is more fair. Obamacare is not the replacement I think is appropriate but that’s another story all together.

I’m sorta thinking that I’ve been cooped up in the house too much and that’s given me a real bad case of cabin fever.

The problem is that with gas prices soaring I don’t really want to drive anywhere that I don’t have to. I guess it’s going to come down to me deciding that driving someplace to assuage the cabin fever is a “necessary” trip.

Spring and Fall are my two favorite times of year I should be getting happy about the coming Spring. Yet I’m feeling disconnected about it.

I suppose I should bite the bullet, pay for the gas and shake off the late Winter blues with a couple of short day trips. Changing the view might help.

Who’d have ever thought that I could get to a place where I took a view from my mountain for granted?

Here we go again

It’s that wonderful time of year… The time when the Gas prices shoot through the roof.

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This year they’re starting earlier than usual. I guess the Oil executives have to pay for their Christmas yachts somehow…

Of course the local California media is asking Why? They’re also promising a full investigation.

Investigate? How about just looking at the facts.

The problem is as simple as this. California only sells gas that is refined in California.

So if there’s the slightest glitch at any of the refineries, the oil companies get to put a hot poker up all our asses.

This isn’t a smart way to do things. Anyone in manufacturing knows that sole sourcing isn’t smart.

California isn’t the only state that has regulations forcing fuel being sold in the state to have been refined in the state.

I pick on California because it’s the state that I know the most about being one of the people raped at least twice a year by the oil companies. Although in recent years it’s looking more and more like 3 times a year.

As I’ve said before, it’s stuff like the refinery is being maintained, or the refinery needs a bit of paint. Opps, one of executives passed nasty farts. In short, any little excuse to simulate an emergency and thereby jack the prices up.

I’m not driving un-necessarily. I suspect that no-one else is either. Here in my household we’re planning all our trips very carefully and we don’t go anywhere we don’t have to.

This means, no movies, no dining out, no shopping, no bar hopping, in short no luxuries.

If a lot of people in California are adopting similar strategies then pretty soon the California economy will dip.

This means that any layoffs in retail, or food services can be laid squarely at the feet of the oil companies. And they should be!

Crude Oil prices are lower than last year. Brent Crude is about the same. So why the run up?

Can you say Greed???

Good! I knew you could…