Which doesn’t mean, of course, it doesn’t make you want to smash the responsible parties in the face with a baseball bat, just once.   As a man who tries to practice Ahimsa, non-harm to fellow creatures, the feelings this can produce are complicated.

Many things are complicated, granted.  Our exceptional country, we can stipulate, has a sometimes spotty history for doing the right thing.  We know liberals are always banging on about the extermination of the native people, slavery, atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilians after back-channel surrender talks were in the works, segregation,  a century of lynching, the “pre-emptive” invasion and destruction of Iraq, torture, drones, imprisonment of more than a million Americans for arbitrary crimes that harm nobody, a powerful, wealthy gun lobby that makes sure tens of thousands of Americans are free to kill tens of thousands of other Americans every year, blah blah blah– as if liberals never do anything wrong.   

Our world’s most expensive health care system, its expense inflated by fabulously paid private insurance middleman as much as by high tech medical interventions and Big Pharma, vital industries which are sometimes judgmentally called ‘predatory’, allows tens of thousands of Americans to die every year over money issues, even under Obamacare.   Oh, and intergenerational poverty and racism, and not paying women as much as men and not fixing that.  OK, we’re not perfect, but we’re always trying to form a more perfect union.   

Once in a while someone who thinks they’re smart tries, in the face of odds that say, overwhelmingly ‘shut the fuck up, anonymous, powerless asshole’, to write a cogent letter to someone in power who might be moved enough to address at least one systemic, institutional injustice.   I was one such person recently, and I exerted myself mightily over many months, to craft a letter that was readable and proposed solutions to the institutional problems it detailed.  I sent it to our activist, progressive,  not publicity-shy NYS Attorney General.   You can read the final version of my letter here, and the attachments to it here. 

To my relief, I got a prompt response, from the Attorney General’s Division of Social Justice, no less.  Here it is.  You truly can’t make this shit up.

Of course, it would seem churlish of me to note that I’ve never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians/Oneida Healthcare, nor, to my knowledge ever had a billing dispute with either one.   

Hopefully I can remain calm and relatively civil tomorrow when I call this steaming pile of distracted dung, Health Care Bureau Intake Specialist Alexander Bockstein, and inform him that my letter reached his desk in error, as his did mine.   I will need to strike just the right tone to get my letter into the hands of someone who will thank me for it in a manner a bit more on point, indicating they may even have read a paragraph or two of it.  You know what I’m saying?