kunstler | Funny how, in the current national rapture of techno-narcissism, it is
harder than ever to do something that for generations used to be as
simple as pie: to get somebody on the telephone. It’s especially funny
in a time when phones have become a prosthetic extension of every human
hand and pretty much the be-all and end-all of human culture. I hold a
phone, therefore I am!
It’s not so funny that the
places where it is most difficult to connect to a live human being are
among the most critical activities, most particularly every branch of
health care. Hospitals now operate under the entirely false and
obviously dishonest premise that a robotic phone routing system is the
best way to handle communications. Notice that, in the logic of this
system, no distinction is made between mundane business and medical
emergencies. Everybody who calls get’s the same perky robot —always a
woman, by the way, in a dishonest attempt to provide false reassurance
that a “caring” presence (Big Sister) is at the other end of the line.
Whether you call about a billing error or having just shredded your foot
in a rototiller, the message at the other end will always be
democratically the same: “Your call is important to us.” (Not.)
I dwell on these matters because
I spent an inordinate amount of time last week calling around to
several hospitals and doctors offices to get some of my medical records
for a lawsuit I am prosecuting against the manufacturer of a defective
hip implant that gave me cobalt / chromium poisoning. Note also that we
have contrived to make it nearly impossible to obtain our own medical
records.
Now I am, going to reveal to you
why it is so difficult to get a live human being on the telephone at
these important places: because the more of a racketeering matrix
medicine becomes, the more it seeks to evade responsibility for the
consequences. That is, the more medicine becomes a criminal enterprise,
the less it wants to hear from its client/victims. The same ethos is at
work in just about every other realm of corporate enterprise in the USA.
Our problem in the USA is not “capitalism,” it’s racketeering. Why we
fail to comprehend it is one of the abiding mysteries of contemporary
life.
The biggest offender after medicine, of course, is banking. They don’t want to hear from you either.
