Coffee heat rising

Health care

Odorless, stingless sunscreen

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Yesterday while I was rummaging through one of the drawers that needs to be cleaned out, I came across a small tube of sunscreen that I’d bought at the Mayo Clinic’s pharmacy several years ago. Shortly after I’d bought it, I’d “put it away” (read “tossed it in the drawer where it got lost”) and forgotten about it.

Well, the AlphaHydrox I ordered from Amazon.com after the RoC fiasco arrived in the mail. It’s working exactly the same as it did when I first used it: it seems to smooth the wrinkles a little bit, helps with the surface-of-Mars effect, and doesn’t irritate unduly. But as with the retinoids, you really should wear a sunscreen when you’re using alpha-hydroxy acids on your skin, because they can predispose you to sunburn.

I’ve been using Neutrogena’s Ultra-Sheer Dry Touch sunblock, because it’s less obnoxious than most drugstore sunscreens and doesn’t contain PABA, which irritates my skin. Even though its scent is not too strong, it still does stink. I really dislike stuff that’s full of industrial perfume, and of all the industrial perfumes out there, the ones that make you smell like a beach bunny annoy me more than any. This is not something I want to smear on my face and arms every day of my life.

When I spotted the Mayo’s SPF 35 sunscreen, I thought, “I’ll bet this doesn’t stink.” Dab it on and yup! That’s so. Hallelujah! It not only doesn’t make you smell like you just came from the pool or the beach, it doesn’t make your skin sting, either. The stuff is called Vanicream Sensitive Skin Sunscreen, and it contains 8% zinc oxide and 7.5% octinoxate. Unlike other zinc oxide products I’ve used, the “circus clown white” effect rubs in quickly and easily.

Normally I don’t wear much sunscreen, relying instead on clothing, makeup, and a hat to provide sun protection. During the summer, I usually restrict swimming to early morning and after dark. This is partly because PABA, which is no longer used, was quite irritating to my skin and partly because there is some controversy over the use of any sunscreens.

In the first place, humans produce vitamin D through their skin when exposed to sunlight. This is our major source of vitamin D, which is needed to metabolize calcium. Without adequate vitamin D, your bones weaken and voilà! Ostopenia, osteoporosis! Sunblocks (such as zinc oxide) inhibit your body’s ability to make vitamin D, because (obviously) they block your skin’s access to sunlight.

And in the second place, far from preventing skin cancer, sunscreen use has been associated with an increase in malignant melanoma. The products apparently don’t protect against the development of skin cancer as well as people imagine, but because we think we’re protected, we spend more time in the noonday sun than any Englishman or mad dog should.

Thus as you can see, the trick is not to smear chemicals on your skin, but simply to stay out of the sun, except for a few minutes each day specifically for the purpose of metabolizing vitamin D. You need less than 30 minutes of exposure to sunlight twice a week to produce adequate levels. It’s also possible to take vitamin D orally, to good effect in most circumstances.

IMHO, you’re better off to limit sun exposure to just enough to produce a decent amount of vitamin D (which depends on your ethnicity and skin color), to consume vitamin D-fortified dairy products, and to enjoy some salmon now and then. Here in Arizona, I generally wear a wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves even in 110-degree heat (make that especially in 100-degree heat—lightweight cotton or linen actually makes you feel cooler by shading your skin from the sun’s direct blast) and confine my outdoor activities to times when the sun is close to the horizon or below it. I carry a straw hat in the car, so there’ll always be one at hand, and I also leave a big sombrero hanging in the garage for gardening.

Vanicream is not cheap—$14 for four ounces, pretty bracing when you learn that if you’re running around in a bathing suit you should smear a whole ounce of it on yourself. But I figure as long as you’re using a product that could your make skin sun-sensitive, it’s worth it for the face and the age-spot-prone hands and forearms.

An attack of asceticism

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{sigh} Decided to kick the caffeine habit for awhile and so now have a fine caffeine deprivation anemia headache. Today being only the second day of this moment of ascetic virtue, I expect another day or two of migrainish crabbiness.

Once when I went off the killer brew, the headache lasted an entire week! Dang. Hope this goes away sooner than that. I’m allergic to aspirin, acetaminophen and ibuprofen, so headaches and other minor pains are experiences to be…well, appreciated. LOL! As in “it feels so good when it stops.”

Normally, a cup or two of regular tea will dull or even kill the pain. Tea has less caffeine than coffee (heh…at least, the way I brew coffee, the result of which will melt a teaspoon left in the cup any length of time), and so it works for backing off the much stronger coffee. After a day or two, I can drop the caffeinated beverages altogether with no further effects.

Just to perfect my misery, I also decided to get off the sauce for awhile. I usually have one or two glasses of wine or beer a day. Probably two is too much, and two is the normal dose around here. Problem is, I tend to slip over that threshold with wine: an open bottle is too easy to tip over into a glass, especially  if you haven’t finished your meal and you think, “Oh well, a tiny swiggle more won’t hurt.” Several tiny swiggles more and you’ve consumed half a bottle of the stuff! Because I have to get up, walk across the room, retrieve a new bottle of beer from the refrigerator, and open it, I’ll invariably stop after two or even one: the minor effort of having to move around and flip off a top is enough to signal that enough beer is enough.

The immediate cause of this frenzy of self-deprivation was yesterday’s conversation with La Maya. She’s determined to go on a diet, and she remarked that a mutual friend has lost a lot of weight but is drinking again and so seems to be gaining it back. I’d like to say our friend is more of a lush than I, but as a practical matter a half-bottle of wine is about a half-bottle too much. So we won’t be calling her kettle black.

Also lately I’ve been having a lot of heart palpitations, diagnosed as “stress attacks” by the worthies at the Mayo. These can be pretty scary, because they cause lightheadedness that at times makes me feel like I’m going to pass out. One of these occurred the other day while I was riding down a long escalator, which was a bit alarming. More often they happen when I’m driving at a high rate of speed on some road where there’s no place to pull over. So far they haven’t caused an actual faint, but I suppose there’s always a first time. Whether there’s a connection between these episodes and the coffee or the wine, I don’t know.

But I do know that sometimes the body seems to get saturated with caffeine, resulting in an overall sense of angst and jitteriness. That’s when it’s time to get off the bean. And I suspect there’s a connection between early-in-the-day caffeine and night-time insomnia. Even though my coffee consumption ends by about ten in the morning, older people metabolize drugs (which is what caffeine is) more slowly than younger ones. So it makes sense that the stuff could build up in your system over time and begin to affect you over a 24-hour period.

Interestingly, opinions are mixed about the real harm or benefits either of my favorite potables cause. We’re told by the worthy authors of Wikipedia that

Coffee consumption has been shown to have minimal or no impact, positive or negative, on cancer development; however, researchers involved in an ongoing 22-year study by the Harvard School of Public Health state that “the overall balance of risks and benefits [of coffee consumption] are on the side of benefits.” Other studies suggest coffee consumption reduces the risk of being affected by Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, diabetes mellitus type 2, cirrhosis of the liver, and gout. A longitudinal study in 2009 showed that those who consumed a moderate amount of coffee or tea (3–5 cups per day) at midlife were less likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in late-life compared with those who drank little coffee or avoided it altogether.

Very nice. On the other hand, as we learn from the same source,

Coffee prepared using paper filters removes oily components called diterpenes that are present in unfiltered coffee. Two types of diterpenes are present in coffee: kahweol and cafestol, both of which have been associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease via elevation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels in blood. Metal filters, on the other hand, do not remove the oily components of coffee.

Yes. Well, I happen to favor French-press coffee, qui s’en fie de paper filters. I’m doomed!

As for wine, medical researchers apparently like the stuff, because they can’t bring themselves to condemn it wholeheartedly. Let’s get real here: it is, after all, booze. Nevertheless, we learn that

Population studies have observed a J curve association between wine consumption and the risk of heart disease. This means that heavy drinkers have an elevated risk, while moderate drinkers (at most two five-ounce servings of wine per day) have a lower risk than non-drinkers. Studies have also found that moderate consumption of other alcoholic beverages may be cardioprotective, although the association is considerably stronger for wine. Also, some studies have found increased health benefits for red wine over white wine, though other studies have found no difference. Red wine contains more polyphenols than white wine, and these are thought to be particularly protective against cardiovascular disease.

Hmh. I’ll drink to that.

Problem is, we’re never clearly told what “moderate” consumption is. The Brits would have us believe “moderate” means about a third of a small wine glass or half a pint of beer—a sip or two that, IMHO, would never last through a full meal. Five ounces, however, is a fair amount: almost half of one of my huge burgundy glasses. Here’s one of those monsters with five ounces of water measured into it:

Two swiggles of that much wine, and I’m cha-chaing around the kitchen. w00t!

The whole idea of depriving oneself of the minor pleasures of life in the name of some health or moral benefit has always struck me as dubious. Life is difficult, after all. One has few enough small joys (or large ones). Does it really make sense that taking away the small pleasures that make life worth living is going to make things better?

I doubt it.

However, experience has shown that long-term consumption of the type of Europeanized cowboy coffee I happen to favor will build up a state of tenseness and may contribute to the alleged “stress attacks.” Since I have nothing to be stressed over just now, it’s reasonable to run a test to see whether the caffeine has anything to do with that.

And the wine and beer? Well, like my friends, I certainly could stand to lose five or ten pounds. That beloved beer, in particular, is adding mostly empty calories. Now’s the time, while the weather is good, to be exercising, cutting calories, and running off some fat.

Good grief! Near-disaster with Medicare Part D choice

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So in the wee hours of the morning, while enjoying another spate of insomnia, I decided to kill some time looking up Wellcare, the Medicare Part D provider toward which I was leaning by the end of yesterday’s exploration of that corner of the insurance industry’s corporate bureaucracy.

I thought that  exploration was through the Looking Glass? Ah, no, my friends: that was down the Rabbit Hole!

Turns out that in 2009 the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services enjoined Wellcare from enrolling new customers in its Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D programs because of the egregiousness of the complaints against it. Says a Florida newspaper:

Regulators cited a long list of problems: deceptive sales practices, delays with urgent customer problems, forged enrollment documents and the highest complaint rate in the nation.

The “problems” have been going on for a while. In 2007, the FBI, HSS, and the Florida Attorney General’s office raided Wellpoint’s Tampa headquarters.

In a now-unsealed plea agreement [says Wikipdia], prosecutors and a former employee said the company inflated expenditures by submitting fake documents to the state. Under some mental health care contracts, WellCare was paid a flat per-patient fee and required to spend at least 80 percent of it on care. Any leftover amount beyond 20 percent was to be repaid to the state, but the bogus expenditures allowed WellCare to keep that surplus. WellCare agreed in August to repay $35 million, its best estimate of the total wrongly kept from 2002-2006. After the raid, the company restated its quarterly and annual profits, driving down net income by $32 million, and saw its top three executives resign. No criminal charges have been announced against WellCare or its officials but investigations by Florida, Connecticut and federal prosecutors are ongoing. The Securities and Exchange Commission is leading an informal investigation, and Wellcare faces numerous shareholder lawsuits and sealed whistleblower complaints, the company’s SEC filings say.

This is one of the best that Arizona offers?

Well, hell. I’m glad I looked the company up before I got myself into its Part D plan. But damn! this leaves me right back where I started before I spent several hours of my time trying to figure out which of these hideous outfits won’t rip me off or try to keep me from buying needed drugs.

There doesn’t seem to be anyplace you can go to get a straight story about these companies. The material at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website is highly technical—there’s nothing that seems helpful for consumers. The HealthMetrix Research site addresses Medicare Advantage programs, which don’t interest me. The National Senior Citizens Law Center (NSCLC) noted in October 2009 that Wellcare still appeared in the government’s listing of Part D providers even though it was still prohibited from enrolling new customers. Very few, if any, intelligible resources are out there.

The Center for Medicare Advocacy notes,

Medicare beneficiaries, their advocates and other helpers cannot be assured that the information provided to them on the Plan Finder is accurate. They need to drill as deeply as possible into the Plan Finder tool to ascertain whether reference-based pricing and other utilization management tools apply to their prescriptions. They need to check the plan web site and contact the plan customer service line to ascertain how the pricing might work. Even then, they cannot be assured that the plan they believe to be the lowest cost drug plan for them will, in fact, provide the most coverage at the lowest cost.

NSCLC advises people to talk to their State Health Insurance Assistance  Program (SHIP). In Arizona this office is staffed by volunteers. I’ve had a couple of good experiences with those folks and one that was not so great. The last guy I got on the phone was an utter moron. He flat refused to listen to the question I was asking him and instead nattered on and interminably on with stuff that wasn’t relevant and that I already knew. Another one, a woman, was very nice and personally supportive, but when you came right down to it she just wanted to chat—what she told me wasn’t especially useful or enlightening. A third person gave me some very good information. But you see the issue: I had to call three times and talk to three different people to get a cogent answer to a simple question.

I can see I’m going to have to blow another day trying to figure this garbage out. Beyond annoying…beyond frustrating…it’s infuriating!

Medicare Part D: Another adventure in Wonderland

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Just shoveled a couple more piles of bureaucratic grief off my desk, finally. I’ve put off dealing with Medicare Part D and Medigap insurance, mostly because after the interminable hassles entailed in getting free of state service, I’ve developed quite the flinch reflex about filling out forms. The mere thought of having to fill out another form makes my gut clench. And the prospect of having to navigate still more bureaucratic shoals gives me a headache. Put them together: you get a case of insomnia that would keep Dracula awake at noon.

With the “have to go to class now” excuse mooted by spring break, this morning I forced myself to return to the Medigap application from Mutual of Omaha, an outfit that, from what I can tell, is among the least rapacious of the insurers selling these products in Arizona.

As you might guess, I’m less than fond of medical insurance companies. Several hellish experiences in the past have led me to regard the health insurance industry as the Evil Empire of Bureaucracies. Contemplating a DIY transaction with any of the dark angels that inhabit that place gives me the willies. When Mutual of Omaha’s application arrived in the mail, I glanced over it and then set it aside on my desk, where it’s been gathering dust and sinking beneath the steady sprinkle of still other pieces of paper I don’t want to handle.

But it wasn’t as horrible as I feared. Though the form was six crowded pages long, two pages didn’t apply to me, and so trudging through it consumed only a half-hour or 45 minutes. The worst part was having to sign a form giving the insurance company access to all my private medical records, no holds barred. Sign, wretch, or it’s no Medigap coverage for you! I just hate that. Once I had an insurance company demand that my doctor hand over twenty-five years’ worth of notes on every consultation and treatment I had ever had with him or any of his partners. As you can imagine, I found that deeply offensive. I still find it deeply offensive. Yea, verily, I find the entire lash-up that is the U.S. healthcare system deeply offensive.

Anyway, off it went. That will set me back $91 a month.

Next, it was on to the Medicare Part D (Prescription Drug Coverage) conundrum. After you’ve figured out which of the rapacious insurance companies will provide you with a Medigap policy (which covers the very large holes in Medicare Parts A and B) at the least extortionate price, you are required to sign up for Part D, another pushmi-pullyu program that tries to make up for traditional Medicare’s lacunae.

Healthy as a horse? Don’t think you need it? Well, screw you! If you don’t sign up the instant you become eligible for Medicare but instead wait until you think the chances of illness are higher, then you’re charged a stiff fine. So it’s get on the boat now or pay through the schnozzola for the privilege of swimming out to the boat later on.

As with Medigap, a mob of insurers offers up Part D policies. Coverage is pretty much uniform, but monthly premiums range from around $10 a month to over $80 a month. Because Medigap and Part D are regulated by the federal government, the plans offer the same general features. As far as I can tell, the major differences are the deductibles, the rules governing which meds you may and may not have, customer (dis)service, and the ways individual companies find to maximize the cost of meds for the customer.

Mercifully, the feds have a site that will conjure up a table comparing aspects of all the Part D providers in your state. When I said I was 65 and about to start Medicare in Arizona, this site disgorged details on 44 outfits selling insurance here. Ugh!

To compare these details, you have to call up a separate page for each company, wherein you find all sorts of microscopically printed information. It does allow you to compare apples with apples, but the chore is not easy. To simplify matters, I picked a half-dozen that looked like they had relatively decent customer satisfaction (reviews are rated, Amazon.com-style, with one to five stars; for Arizona, none achieved a five-star ranking overall and only a couple made it to four). The “details” pages break the ratings down into four categories: customer service, complaints, a vague “member experience,” and drug price and safety. Several other issues are also presented in more detail.

On the surface, dizzying. To arrive at something like a meaningful guess at a reasonable choice, I set up an Excel spreadsheet. In it, I created columns for the monthly premium, the government’s estimated total monthly cost for a typical well customer and for someone who suffers a serious illness, the deductible, and the four ratings categories.

Strangely, the premium bears only vaguely on the probable cost of medication for a serious illness, such as a heart attack or congestive heart failure. With most policies, the overall monthly cost of such an ailment ranges from $150 to $200. That’s not always true, though: if you’ve subscribed to Aetna’s $82.20/month policy, a major illness is likely to cost you $200 to $250 a month.

Once I’d entered the data, I sorted it by several criteria. Click on the tables to see them in a readable font size.

The results, I think, helped to clarify matters. On the lower end, where monthly premiums are vaguely within reason, the annual deductible is, with one exception, an astonishing $310. This means, of course, that if you’re healthy and, like me, take no medications, or even if you take only one or two in generic form, you’re paying for air: most of the time your costs will come in way under the deductible. Paying more to get out of the deductible pushes your monthly overall cost so high (as, for example, in the pricey Aetna plan mentioned above) that you’d lose unless you had a very expensive chronic condition like Parkinson’s or MS.

Interestingly, the plan sold by AARP, which vaunts itself as the champion of the elderly, ranks rather low by most criteria.

An outfit called Wellcare consistently comes up with good to high ratings. It does especially well in the important categories of performance ratings and of drug safety and cost. This company offers two plans in Arizona, the “Classic” and the “Signature.” From what I can tell, the only difference is that the “Signature” plan has no deductible. When you compare the two plans’ overall monthly cost, you discover that even though the no-deductible plan will run you $15 a month more than the plan with the $310 deductible, the plans’ overall monthly cost is almost identical. So basically, you can expect the same results from the $20/month plan as you can from the $35/month plan!

So, though I have yet to go out on the Web to read consumer complaints, I’m leaning toward the Wellcare Classic. The cost is on the low end, but apparently service and coverage are about the same as the higher-end Signature policy. Customers are better satisfied with Wellcare than with most other vendors: the performance rankings put it second behind the pricey Medco, but only by a quarter of a point. Wellcare is the only one of our selected companies to achieve 5 points in any category—and it does so in the important matter of drug safety. (You understand, these outfits are capable of dictating what drugs you can take, and they do so on the basis of cost, ignoring potential side effects and interplay with certain chronic ailments like diabetes.)

Once all these plans (not to say “schemes”) are cobbled together to provide adequate healthcare coverage, the cost is astonishing.

Medicare Part B will cost me $110 a month. People who are already enrolled get no increase from the 2009 premium of $95; those who come on board in 2010, however, get an inflation gouge even though, like other beneficiaries, they get no commensurate increase in Social Security. Medigap: $90.80 a month. Medicare Part D: $19.70 a month. Total: just over $220 a month for starters.

I do understand that many people are paying a much larger gouge to cover one person. But still… Compared to the $36 a month I’ve been paying for the same coverage with no deductible and with only modest copays, it looks pretty stiff.

And to figure this stuff out, you end up taking a swan-dive through the Looking-Glass. I fail to understand why it’s necessary to make this business so complex, so difficult, and so scattered that you have to build a freaking spreadsheet to parse out your best choices!

Despite regulation that is supposed to guarantee uniform coverage, it has taken hours of analysis and puzzlement to identify Medigap and Part D policies that look like they won’t cheat me and appear to provide tolerable customer service. The whole process has been confusing and difficult…and I think I still have most of my marbles.

Imagine the confusion this mess creates for less educated or more vulnerable elders—and the opportunities to prey on them! It’s just effing inexcusable.

Update

“Inexcusable” about describes it. The plot thickens: as it develops the government’s opaque site dispenses information most kindly described as incomplete. Check out the next revelation.

Medicare, Medigap, and Long-Term Care Premiums: How deductible are they?

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In response to my rumination about the strategy for surviving in Year 1 of Bumhood, when Social Security imposes an earnings limitation that amounts to real poverty, readers have speculated that structuring my business as a sole proprietorship rather than as an S-corporation would allow  me to deduct Medicare, Medigap, and long-term care premiums dollar-for-dollar against business income, rather than having to jump the 7.5% hurdle set up for people who itemize. Frugal Scholar made the interesting discovery that “employees of an S corp can take the self-employment health insurance deduction.”

It’s an interesting concept; I just sent off an e-mail to Tax Lawyer inquiring about it.

Somehow, though, I doubt Uncle Sam will let me run Medicare premiums through a corporation. Social Security automatically withholds Medicare Part B from your Social Security check—you don’t get a choice about it. It might be possible to work some sort of scam with the Medigap premiums, but even there…questionable.

The point of incorporating CE Desk as an S-corp, in my case, is to allow me to stay in business during this endless first year of penury, during which the government penalizes me if I earn more than $14,160 because I’m under age 66. I earn about $240 more than that teaching six sections of freshman comp. Without a way to shelter my editing and blogging income, I would have to close both of those enterprises down. As we know, when you quit working at a freelance enterprise, your clients go away permanently, so that when you want to revive your little business, you have to start over from scratch. I’m getting too darned old to start over from scratch! Plus FaM is starting to earn a small but steady income…I don’t want to get rid of that, either.

Channeling the income from the S-corp means that if I earn, let’s say, $5,000, through freelance enterprises, the money belongs to the corporation, not to me. I am an employee of the corporation. My “job” is to direct the corporation. The corporation has to pay me an amount deemed “reasonable” by the IRS. It’s not paying me for my day-to-day editing and writing work; it pays me to be a corporate director. So, on a $5,000 income it pays me a little over $500. That is salaried income.

The S-corp does not shelter the salary you pay yourself from self-employment tax. What it does is convert some (but not all) of your freelance income into a “dividend,” on which none of the social welfare taxes are due. From my pittance, it has to withhold FICA and Medicare, and it has to pay FUTAand the employer’s share of FICA on the amount it pays me. The rest of the money—the part that remains after my “salary” is paid—can either remain in the corporation to be used to cover operating expenses (or just to sit there) or can be disbursed to the corporation’s owner(s) as “dividends.”

Because Social Security views dividends as return on investment, not as salaried income, this part of my freelance revenues doesn’t count toward the $14,160 earnings limit.

While it is true that you don’t pay self-employment tax on the dividend part of your drawdown from the corporation, it also is true that you don’t get credit toward Social Security for that part of your annual earnings. Thus if you did this for a very long time—say, starting fresh out of law school or medical school—you would greatly reduce the amount of your Social Security entitlement when the time comes to retire. If you engaged this strategy, you would have to be certain that you were going to earn and save a great deal of money during your career…otherwise, in your old age you’d end up just as penurious as an aging college English lecturer.

According to Elderlaw, qualified long-term care insurance premiums and Medigap premiums are regarded as medical expenses and are deductible if they exceed 7.5% of your gross income:

Premiums for “qualified” long-term care policies will be treated as a medical expense and will be deductible to the extent that they, along with other unreimbursed medical expenses (including “Medigap” insurance premiums), exceed 7.5 percent of the insured’s adjusted gross income. If you are self-employed, the rules are a little different. You can take the amount of the premium as a deduction as long as you made a net profit–your medical expenses do not have to exceed 7.5 percent of your income.

Medigap will cost me about $1,200 in 2010; long-term care is about $960, for a total of $2,160. Medicare Part B will cost me $1,326 this year.

According to IRS Publication 502, Part B premiums are also treated as medical expenses:

Medicare B is a supplemental medical insurance. Premiums you pay for Medicare B are a medical expense. If you applied for it at age 65 or after you became disabled, you can include in medical expenses the monthly premiums you paid.

Thus the total amount, before I buy any eyeglasses, contact lenses, or prescriptions, that will qualify as medical expenses will be $1,326 + $1,200 + $960 = $2286. And I’m not even adding Medicare Part D into that. The total, with Part D, probably will come to around $2,400.

If I stand down off one class this fall, my total earned income will be $1257(12) + $2,400(5) + $500 + $500(12) = $33,584. That’s Social Security + teaching + freelance income + drawdown from 403(b). Multiply that by 7.5% and you get $2,518. So…one pair of Costco glasses puts me over the 7.5% qualifying threshold—that’s before I visit a doctor, before I buy a prescription drug, before I buy a couple boxes of contact lenses, before I pay for a shingles shot. And the 7.5% is on adjusted gross income, which you can be sure will be less than $33,584.

I don’t earn enough from freelancing to live on (far, far from it!), and so there’s no question of my working the business so that I write off medical costs and everything else against my taxes. If a miracle happened and FaM’s traffic went up about tenfold, I’d have to reconsider that. But unless the government can be persuaded to regard my teaching income as “self-employed” (which Tax Lawyer says it will not do), in my case the S-corporation is probably better than a sole proprietorship, because it allows me to keep the pittance I do earn through freelance editing and blogging from biting into my Social Security earnings.

Next year, when I’m 66 and can work until I drop without being punished for the privilege, will be another matter. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Oops! Easy on the RoC de-wrinkle stuff!

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So, when I bought the Costco Lifetime Supply of RoC Retinol Correxion Deep Wrinkle Night Cream gunk, as part of the new lifestyle retread scheme, I thought I was buying the usual wussy over-the-counter pretend cosmetico-pharmaceutical, designed and pitched to make the customer feel good but in reality unlikely to do much of anything.

Wrong!

It definitely does something. What exactly the something is remains to be seen. However, at the moment it’s a shade on the alarming side.

The stuff stings a little when you put it on, but I took that as unremarkable, because the Alpha-Hydrox I used to smear on my face did the same. Today, however, an hour or two after I’d rubbed this stuff in, covered it with an SPF 45 sun block, and powdered over the whole mess with SPF 20 makeup, my cheeks and chin started to hurt and feel uncomfortably parched.

Naturally, I was on the campus, so there was nothing I could do to get it off. Not for several hours after this burning sensation began did I get home where I could remove the layers of makeup and goop.

Once I washed it all off, what I discovered is that my face looks like it’s been burned. Not critically—like a middling sunburn, I’d say. But still: the irritation is there, and the skin all over my cheeks and nose has turned bright red.

I have been staying out of the sun, and each morning I’ve applied a liberal dose of Neutrogena’s best SPF 45 sun cream, plus some fairly opaque makeup also advertised to have some SPF qualities. So I doubt that it’s sunburn. I think it’s a reaction to the wrinkle gunk.

The package copy says, “You may experience mild tingling and redness during use.” Hm. I’m not sure “mild” is the term I’d use here. It continues: “This is normal and should be temporary until your skin adjusts.”

We shall see.

In the meantime, we’ll be hurrying the “adjustment” along by cessation. I’m going to quit using this stuff, at least until the inflammation subsides.

I probably overdid the slathering by applying the gunk in the morning as well as at night. The package does say you can do this, as long as you’re careful to use sunblock and hats. But it seems to recommend using it at night only.

A number of users have complained about similar discomfort. Unlike this woman, I do not have sensitive skin (to the contrary), but the effect fits what she describes, except for the eye symptoms. Presumably the redness and burning sensation will go away, one hopes without lasting damage.

If you’re going to use RoC or something like it, I’d suggest a conservative approach. It might be wise to try it on a small patch for a few days (it took several days for this reaction to develop!). Also, I certainly wouldn’t advise applying it more than once a day—maybe less than that, once every two or three days.

While it’s less than pleasant to go around in old-lady rhino hide, some things may be worse…