God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health caredebate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.

Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.

Poor kids are much more likely to become sick than their richer counterparts, but much less likely to have health insurance. Talk about a double whammy.

No one thinks anything silly is suitable when they are an adolescent. Such an enormous share of their own behavior is silly that they lose all proper perspective on silliness, like a baker who is nauseated by the sight of his own eclairs. This provides another good argument for the emerging theory that the best use of cryogenics is to freeze all human beings when they are between the ages of twelve and nineteen.

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

I'm going to live long enough to live in an America that will assume universal health care is a basic right. That will be amusing and terrific.