Here's a fun fact about living in San Francisco: you're probably paying through the nose for health insurance you barely use, while simultaneously having no idea what your cholesterol looks like. Welcome to the club.

But there's a workaround floating around that deserves more attention. Vitalant, the blood donation nonprofit, partners with a service called GoodLabs that lets you get comprehensive bloodwork — cholesterol, vitamins, hormones, the works — for free when you donate blood. There are two locations in the city: one downtown on Bush Street and one out at Stonestown. You book through the GoodLabs site, show up, donate, and get your results back in about five days.

That's it. No copay, no insurance runaround, no waiting three months to see a primary care doctor you don't have yet.

And let's be honest about why this matters. A staggering number of people in this city — particularly younger transplants — don't have a primary care physician. California's insurance marketplace isn't exactly intuitive, and even with coverage, out-of-pocket lab costs can run hundreds of dollars. The result? People just... don't get tested. For years. That's not a healthcare system working as intended.

One SF resident put it perfectly: they hadn't had blood tests done in over two years since moving from the East Coast, and only discovered through this free service that their vitamin D was "super low" — which, as they noted, is "kind of embarrassing considering I live in California." (For what it's worth, basically every adult in America is vitamin D deficient at this point, sunshine state or not.)

This is the kind of solution we love at The Dissent: no government program, no taxpayer tab, no bureaucratic maze. Just a nonprofit that needs blood meeting individuals who need health data. Voluntary exchange, mutual benefit. The market doing its thing.

If you've been putting off bloodwork because the system makes it too expensive or too complicated, this is your sign. You get peace of mind, someone else gets a life-saving donation, and nobody had to file a form in triplicate. That's how it should work.