Last Thursday, I arrived at the VA clinic precisely on time and waited exactly forty-five seconds before being called to the back. As a nurse drew four small vials of blood with only the tiniest of stabs, I told her I needed a script. She gave me a specimen cup and within five minutes I was walking out of the clinic. My medication was waiting for me when I arrived at the pharmacy about eight minutes later.

Today I arrived at the plasma donation center. The staff spent ninety minutes getting me processed because the fingerprint scanner did not like my fingers (staff complained the system had been problematic since morning). The phlebotomist used the same vein with less success and a lot more pain. The drawing equipment had a malfunction and had to be reset.

Because of its volume and mandates, the VA has enforced a near-military efficiency and keeps costs down, yet manages to offer extraordinary speed and quality of care. The plasma center has experienced a change of ownership and policy recently. What comes of having a comprehensive and full charter to deliver care?

Well: the former is a place where veterans are diagnosed and treated, while the latter is a factory farm for plasma product that had to close its doors for two weeks this fall while staff were re-trained to do what they were already doing.

I don’t think one could find a better contrast of experiences. The first is the reality of “government takeover” health care, the latter is a fantasy among opponents of “Obamacare.” Think about all those Soylent Green Death Panelz™ that surveys say Republican voters actually believe in. The plasma center is basically as close as American medicine comes.

Of course, the factual retort is that the plasma center isn’t a place where people are “treated.” But in fact the plasma is collected to make medicines for human use, and medical incidents do occur in the plasma center. Blood spurting on my arm is a medical incident. The loosely-wrapped bandage not putting enough pressure on my venipuncture site because the new owners are using cheaper tape? That too is a medical incident. If I suffer problems from the anticoagulants in my bloodstream, it is a medical incident.

The place where humans become cattle, a source of revenue to be denied for any reason, where the care is uncaring and not even care, where lucky, healthy poor people go to earn fifty dollars a week for five hours of time while the sick and old are sent away, is not the government health care facility.

Where equipment works because someone spent money on a hardier model, where a routine of paper and electronic records make mistakes harder to make and easier to correct, is the clinic between a veterinarian and a storage business just moments from downtown.

The plasma center is also close to downtown — and the poorest sections of the city. The lowest property values in town lie within walking distance. On one side, a title loan and check-cashing business; on the other, an “antiques” store with a check cashing sign in the window.

Without a doubt, the plasma center should exist. It should keep turning plasma into medicine. The benefactors can be those who have enough health care coverage to afford the added cost of free-market middlemen and providers, or it can include the people selling their blood plasma for slightly less than median rent each month.

It’s our choice. One party argues that making an affordable policy available to them — even a simple mandate-driven indigent coverage program for the Emergency Room — is a recipe for disaster. The other has been amenable to change, however un-change-y, and (from its point of view) has paid the price in electoral disaster.

At its core, the GOP’s success in 2010 has been to caricature government in the very image of free-market reality. I have never been stuck so poorly by the Red Cross, either. At the bloody intersection where rubber tube meets sharp steel, “profit,” not government, is the false idol.