I can't take this anymore! Everything is terrible! My therapist told me to get off Twitter!

Have you or someone you loved said any of the above phrases lately? If so, you might have been exposed to a rapidly growing disease known as "Living in America." It is not thought to be immediately fatal (though your skin color, gender identity, or sexual orientation can affect that, as can the whims of a man in North Korea), but it is bad for your health. And as such, like the surgeon general on a pack of cigarettes, I feel like I must warn you that what follows might be bad for your health. It may give you anxiety, heart burn, depression, panic attacks, and "nervous tummy."

So it's time you meet Georgia State Representative Betty Price. Price, who also happens to be the wife of Donald Trump's former HHS secretary Tom Price, who had to resign over his constant use of private planes on the taxpayer dime, was at a hearing this week on barriers to access to adequate health care when she said something despicable and shocking. And, look we live in times where nothing has the power to shock anymore, but this story from ProjectQ? This was shocking.

“My thinking sometimes goes in strange directions, but before you proceed if you wouldn’t mind commenting on the surveillance of partners, tracking of contacts, that sort of thing. What are we legally able to do?" "And I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it. Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition. So we have a public interest in curtailing the spread. What would you advise or are there any methods legally that we could do that would curtail the spread?”

Okay, so this is just Betty Price's thinking just going "in strange directions." Well that "strange" direction is also an ignorant and dangerous direction. HIV is still incredibly misunderstood. With the timely detection and the right treatment, HIV is no longer a death sentence and the chances of its spread can be greatly reduced. An increase in condom usage and Truvada for PrEP (a once-daily pill, a la birth control, that reduces your likelihood of contracting HIV by 99%) can reduce the infection's spread even further. Price, being a medical doctor, should be somewhat familiar with these things, but instead she half-proposes quarantining people with HIV? This kind of negative stigma only makes people less likely to get tested and get treatment, which in turn... SPREADS THE VIRUS FURTHER.

But that's not all Price had to say. No, she went even further in her disgusting rhethoric.

“It seems to me it’s almost frightening the number of people who are living that are potentially carriers, well they are carriers, with the potential to spread, whereas in the past they died more readily and then at that point they are not posing a risk. So we’ve got a huge population posing a risk if they are not in treatment,” Price said later during Wortley's presentation.

Yes. That is a state representative and medical doctor COMPLAINING about the fact that people with HIV are living longer now. And this woman's husband, until recently, was the kind of person that Donald Trump thought should be in charge of health and human services. And yes, that is terrifying as terrifying can be.