I'm old. When you read this, I will be older in accordance with that convention regarding birthdays, wherein you age a year all on one day. I hate convention but it's all I've got so I embrace it like a bald man embraces his comb-over. The Special Theory of Relativity says that you don't age so much as you hurtle, at enormous speed, up your world-lines in the space-time continuum. (I've always wanted to say "up your world-lines.") It's a good thing we are hurtling into the future where nothing has happened yet. If we hurtled into the past we would constantly be stubbing our toes and banging our noses against events that have already been, and is/would be there now, were now to become then.
Another good thing about being old and getting older so fast, for me, is that it runs out my biological clock. Barring an unforeseeable catastrophic medical miracle, I will miss the 22nd century. I've read that the 22nd century will be the pits. There will be no oil and no coal, so even though there will still be hair dryers and toaster ovens, they won't work. Or, thanks to solar and wind power, they will work if you make an appointment with the power company in advance, or can wait until hurricane season. There will be no food banks, either, because there will only be just enough food in the world to feed the rich.
Here's something to ponder: Food is essential to good health. If you've got scurvy, the prescription is going to be a lemon. But lemons, and all other foods, are over-the-counter. So drug plans won't cover them.
The practice of drug plans not paying for OTC medicine is what I wanted to talk about this week. Being old, it's taken me five paragraphs to get to it. Also, being old, I take lots of medicine and some of the best stuff is OTC, and my drug plan won't pay for it, so it's personal.
Doctors are helping patients deal with this situation by prescribing alternative medications that are not OTC. This trick also works if your drug goes generic and gets bumped off your drug plan's formulary. If the patient can't afford Tylenol