This HMO

Dear The Insurance Companies, and Dear the Managed Care Agencies, and dear all the people who work for them, yes you, the CEO's and the share holders, the drones on the phones and the schmucks cleaning out their garbage cans at night, and while we're talking, dear all the people that THOSE people hire personally, their housekeepers and gardeners and tax attorneys and pro-doms. This one, this is for ALL of you. To whit,
understand the following: You are all, each and every one of you, and there are absolutely, definitely, NO exceptions here I am so very sorry to say, pure and unadulterated evil.  The kind of evil that causes crops caught in its shadow to wither and crumble, the kind of evil that begets only further and further evil, the kind of viscous, insidious evil that erodes and decays whatever it touches, penetrating it fully until any possible good that could have come out of it is forever imbrued with its horrific taint. (Huhuhuh, 'taint.' But seriously.)

"But JAKE!" I hear you cry. "Most of those people are just trying to get by! They're just making a living as best they can for crying out loud!  They clean the toilets fuck, and you're calling that minimum wage earner evil?? WTF!?"

Yes. When you see evil, real evil, not just your standard every day asshole kind of grossness, but TRUE evil, the kind of autonomic, headless, impersonal, cold evil that will, without any speck of sympathy or mercy, sooner wipe your existence off the face of the earth rather than put your existence above its own gains, you must label it as such. Worse, it will do all of this without even any malice, that's the truly horrific part, its simple and whole and completely personified self interest.

When we speak of an industry whose sole job it is to deny people access to health care in favor of their own profit margin, we cannot call it anything other than what it is. Old school, pure evil. Classical definitions of "evil" usually include some type of knowing breach of a moral code to the detriment of others. I have to wonder, if your job is to make access to health care more difficult and, for example, make a person choose which finger they can afford to have reattached because they cannot afford to have both procedures completed, what kind of moral code would you say that breaches?  If I went to a person and did the same thing, looked into their eyes and said, "You just lost two fingers in an accident. I have the power to give both of them back, but I won't. I will make you choose which one, because you can only afford one and that is not my problem, so choose." Well. I imagine I'd be labeled as evil faster than you can say "heartless cruelty."  Another example: As a health care provider, I know that the weight you are gaining as a side effect of the medication I'm giving you could be avoided if I gave you a newer, different medication, but I won't do it because I'm being paid more by the other drug company and that would eat into my profits if I switched you. Am I evil now?

Of course I would be. Of course it is. Withholding healthcare as a right for the privileged and the lucky is the system we've created.  It positively identifies people who are worth more than others.  It quantifies life, a proposition so ludicrous as to be sickening and yet so many believe in it I wonder if we're of the same species.     But we're digressing. The managed care companies feed off of and support this system. Aggressively lobby against and fight any alternative system.  And anyone who supports that system by working for its supportive agencies is evil by proxy.  I'm guilty too, I pay into the system because I have no other choice, but that's the elegant ubiquitous insidiousness of evil at work again, it makes itself the only option, and makes everything it touches part of its machinations. I'm a part of it, I'm responsible, as is every healthcare provider who has ever charged an insurance company.

So here we are. "So what, Jake, we're all evil. Fine. Thanks for the fucking PSA. I signed the petition for ObamaCare, ok? So now what?"  So now you get your ass to the nearest person who thinks this system makes sense and you make it your job to convince them otherwise.  Try to understand where they're coming from and appeal to their humanity.  If they're not human, help them remember that they were once.  It'll probably have to involve maps, good luck with that.  I've turned a fair few people in my time, but I know a lot more I've failed to touch. One of them, a libertarian I went to school with, horrified me so completely I never touched the subject again. She was a fellow NP. Is a fellow NP. In Texas or some other place that supports those views.  I poked her social network recently. I'm waiting to hear back.  I'm going to try.  Every little speck of sludge I'm able to scrape off of myself makes me feel a little bit better about my own associative culpability.  Try it.