For comparison. When George Washington got sick right before he died, the doctors thought at the time that sickness was caused by bad blood. So they would put leaches on people and even drain blood right out of the persons body to try and cure them.

Today doctors know better. They know that you need your blood in you to help you fight off whatever infection you have and they know that loss of blood can make you sick and even kill you. So they don’t drain peoples blood any more.

Sometimes doctors put a saline solution into a person through an I V when they have lost a lot of blood. This dilutes the blood but keeps the blood pressure up enough to keep it circulating to critical areas of the body.

Somehow though the current Congress has gotten this idea that you can cure an economy by bleeding it with taxes, or diluting it with inflation. They look at our sick economy, banks that have made bad loans, Businesses that have had to lay off workers, Manufacturers that have lost market share to foreign competition, People that have lost their homes to foreclosure and they think the solution to getting things going again is to increase the tax rates to bring in more money into the government. This is so it can dole out the money and prime the pump in these failing companies. So they Tax and Spend and inflate and pay some bureaucrats to write job descriptions to create new jobs that are green jobs and then they say "have patience. You can’t turn around an ocean liner on a dime. You got to give it all some time to turn around and get some steam up again.

They pass new and higher taxes which takes billions of dollars and millions of jobs out of the economy in order to have a fund which they use to create thousands of jobs and then they say, "have patience. It will take some time to get this thing turned around."

Get a clue politicians. Bleeding didn’t work for George Washington. The treatment is what killed him. Why do you think bleeding the economy through taxation or diluting it through inflation is going to cure it?

I have an 18 yo cat. He has serious hyperthyroid, high blood pressure, arthritis, and his vision is bad. His kidneys are OK but on the downward slide, and his liver is iffy.

Every time I go to the vet they say, "Well, he’s not getting better. Let’s adjust his medications, and bring him back in 3 weeks–plus I’d like to add another medication." These visits and tests run me close to 0, and of course they never have a clue what the medications cost. I’ve been through this several times now.

Well, he’s not going to get "better"–he’s 18! What will all these adjustments really achieve, besides costing a fortune and denying me the chance to really deal psychologically with the fact that my cat is slowly dying. But they only write the prescriptions for a few weeks at a time, so I have to go back.

Can I/should I say I don’t want to do any more blood panels, and insist they just renew the prescriptions he’s on for some reasonable period like 6 months?
How can I say this? His quality of life is still OK, I just want to pick a medication level and stick with that until it’s time to put him down, and just monitor things like his weight to see how it’s working.
I didn’t say I wanted to put him down, I said his quality of life is OK now. But they’re talking long-term treatments on a cat who doesn’t have a long-term ahead. His numbers don’t have to be perfect if he’s not going to live long enough for it to matter.