Basic healthcare may have just gotten easier, albeit controversially. The number of walk-in clinics at drugstores like Walgreens, CVS, Wal-Mart, and Duane Reade has been increasing over the last two years, and very little is slowing down plans to add hundreds more across the country. Recent studies cite shorter waiting periods, lower costs, and instant prescription fills for the clinics, in contrast to more expensive and time-consuming trips to doctors' offices. The majority of these clinics also accept most health insurance plans, leaving little incentive for on-the-go Americans to wait days or weeks for non-specialized appointments in conventional offices.The rise in healthcare costs, the decrease in the number able to afford private health insurance, and the inadequate number of primary care physicians across the country have all been building up to this -- perhaps inevitable -- solution. One can now walk in to any number of seven hundred clinics located .. more >>

Irving Fazola of Harbor City made an accurate observation when he wrote - refreshingly, with a typewriter, on a mailed-in green index card - "How about retiring the `unfiltered Camels' line and the same old story you trot out a couple of times a year for the last 10. How many years before you are eligible for retirement? Not soon enough!" OK, so not all of that was refreshing. But the fact remains, I do use that "death from unfiltered Camels" line to describe the loss of my stepfather. And I do it for the same reason I have been yelling at my visiting Scottish niece for the past week. I don't want her to die like he did, slowly and in great pain from suffocation caused by a habit that is no less lethal today than it was three decades .. more >>