fuck me

well, the doc called this afternoon about quarter till five and said i need to get a ct scan of this thing, my "suspicious" parotid gland. too bad i had to blow the $ on the damn ultrasound to find that out. it might have provided me with a down payment on the damn thing if nothing else.



so i have to go pick up the report from her and take it an ent, who will invariably schedule the super-expensive test.





two things:

1. i'd be considerably less fucked if i lived in los angeles county. they have hospitals up there where i could receive treatment regardless of my ability to pay for it. no such safety net exists here in orange county, because they don't give two shits about poor people... i suppose back in the day if you didn't have insurance it was because you were poor. for whatever reason, you were poor. these days though, you can have a decent paying job, and not have it. or be eligible for it but not be able to afford it (our current pickle... it would run us in the neighborhood of $700/mo and that just not doable). there are supposedly some low-cost "alternatives" here in the OC, but sliding scale isn't going to be cheap for me.



2. i also wouldn't be in this pickle if the governator, mr. schwarzenegger, hadn't vetoed SB 840, which would have provided californians a single payer system. from the los angeles times, dated september 6, 2006:

An analysis commissioned by Health Care for All California, a nonprofit group that favors universal health insurance, estimated that universal coverage would have cost an extra $17 billion, but the state would have saved $25 billion through bulk purchasing of drugs and eliminating the multiple bureaucracies now required for hospitals and private insurance companies. The report was prepared last year by the Lewin Group, a Virginia-based healthcare consulting firm.

i wonder how much insurance company money has flowed in ahhhnold's direction since he took office. (*) this is going to become an even bigger problem in this state, and sticking his head in the sand and refusing to be the one to deal with it was the behavior of a very girly man.

* - apparently it's over a million dollars.