Never know what you'll find when you go mall crawling on a Sunday morning. A new Asian goods store (new to me, anyway) has sprung up at Sierra Vista Mall in Clovis. And it's devoted a whole window to a couple hundred dollar coat of mail.

Looks like we're all going to need body armor to survive the economic siege that's ravaging health care -- and personal health. The facts in a Sept. 22nd Wall Street Journal hit me like a load of rocks thrown by a well-built trebuchet.

• The number of prescriptions filled in the U.S. has fallen for first and second quarters of 2008 -- the first negative quarters in roughly a decade.
• People are also scaling back on getting hips and knees fixed or replaced, on getting pap smears.
• How-bad-bad-is examples: A Florida auto dealer is dumping his own health insurance so he can afford checkups for his kids. A Tennessee doc said patient visits are down 10% to 15%, and his patients won't go to specialists when he refers them. A San Diego woman is backing off from cataract surgery because she's still paying off last year's appendectomy. An Indiana woman is skipping her osteoporosis and antidepressant meds so she can pay for her daughter's pricey rheumatoid arthritis drug.

So as we descend into this new Medical Dark Ages, we can be secure in the results from an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll that found 50% of those surveyed would rather watch a football game with presidential candidate Barack Obama, compared to 47% for John McCain.

The remaining 3% were undecided. Maybe they were getting fitted for that coat of mail.