Okay my dear friends... or enemies as the case may be. I have only 1 quick little rant before SA starts. Yesterday, I went to the dermatologist and I was forced to leave in the middle of assembly, and miss an apparently good speech. Anyways, it took about 20 minutes to get there, and then I sat in the waiting room for about 10 minutes. In that time, there were three different patients who came and left while we were waiting. And by the way, there was only one doctor there at the time.

Anyways, my point is that when I went in to see the doctor with my sister. He took one look at my sister's face, said some made-up medical term, and gave her a prescription. Then he did the same for me. The point of all this is that this is one of the problem with our HMO-run medical system. Instead of personal interaction between doctor and patient, like a camraderie, we are faced with a group of cloned white coats giving us extraneous medicine that we don't need simply for the fact that it might make us feel better in my minds, and not our bodies.

Doctor's malpractice insurance has gone up so much lately, that doctors are afraid to do anything simply because of the fact that they don't want to get in trouble, and with the increased rate of frivilous lawsuits in our society (Smirk? Phenol) I can understand their reasoning. Also, HMO's are notorious for not allowing extra tests. They are willing to do anything to avoid spending more money on expensive tests. I think I heard somewhere that they even pay doctors bonuses if they don't order many tests.

Now, I know that our medical system isn't perfect, (especially with regards to medicine prices) but I think that some of the alternatives would be worse. If the government controlled the industry, then we would be inching closer and closer to the socialist government that exists in France, and we would be forced to pay more taxes, which everyone hates, so everyone would be upset. If only there were a perfect solution.

In Utopia, there would be medical care for all without any other repercussions. Even better, there wouldn't be any diseases that needed curing, so there would be no need for hospitals in general... But wait, then all of the wonderful, or not so wonderful, people involved in the health care industry wouldn't have jobs. Oh well. After much consideration, I realized that there is no ideal, we must just work with what we have, as safely as possible. Final Question: "Is it possible to actually DIE from exhaustion?" BL. NP.