It’s pathetic, to put it mildly, the hoops through which our system requires people to jump just to keep themselves healthy. And people with pre-existing conditions, such as Terri Carlson, have it worst of all. Carlson is currently counting down the time until she loses her eligibility for COBRA, at which point she will have absolutely no access to health insurance because she has C4 Complement Deficiency, a rare immune disorder. Carlson is just one of millions of people in the private insurance market who are denied insurance precisely because they need it so much.

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The recovery is now well underway, it appears. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated on Friday that Real Gross Domestic Product grew by 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, which is the fastest rate of growth since mid-2003.

So where are the jobs? They’re coming. In the language of economics, jobs are a “lagging indicator” — meaning that the economy has to be steadily and consistently improving before employers are willing to hire. But job losses have tailed off, and we should begin to see some job growth, although probably meager, this year.

A caveat needs to be made here, as well. First, a significant portion of the GDP growth we saw in the last quarter was likely driven by Federal spending measures that are still in place. We need to resist the urge to reduce spending now that the economy is “fixed.” It isn’t necessarily fixed, and we could easily still slide back into another slump. In fact, the Senate should pass the jobs bill passed by the House to pump additional money into the economy.

Overall, things are looking hopeful, but it’s going to take a long time for a full recovery. In part, that’s because we haven’t had a “real” economic recovery in a long time — we’ve replaced one bubble with another, and our economy hasn’t been based on us actually producing useful goods and services in over a decade. For a truly sustainable recovery, we need to start producing again — and that’s going to take some time.

Six years ago, we launched two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on a 90-day mission to collect data about conditions on Mars. They’re still going. Or rather, Opportunity is still going, and scientists are looking for ways to turn the stuck Spirit into a stationary laboratory; it can’t move, but it can still do science. That announcement was made on day 2213 of Spirit’s 90-day mission.

Every few months, after reading a report about one of the rovers, I marvel that they’re still going. In the span of their original 90-day mission, the rovers contributed immeasurably to our knowledge about Mars. They then proceeded to stretch their lifespan by 24 times their original mandate, and they haven’t stopped yet.

Below the break, as a Friday distraction, don’t miss webcomic xkcd’s take on the Spirit rover.

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