It has been an acrid day today.  I am reeling from a repeat of government inordinate inutility. While I do not habitually equate government (or what is disparagingly called “bureaucracy”) with pointlessness, in this instance – as for the past three months – we are sadly no further ahead than when we started.

I have today gone head-to-head with yet another provincial government official in Business Integration Services whose sole object was to instruct me to speak to another. She had no interest to speak to the claimant nor to review the substance of the claim, a proposition she suggested belonged in someone else’s bailiwick.  She did not offer to redirect the information (much less receive it), insisting only in her putative redress, that it was up to us to make contact with a medical professional who would somehow (she did not explain how) improve our thesis or claim.  The suggestion was either ill-timed (the problem arose over 20 years ago) or redundant (our dossier included all applicable information).

The government official reluctantly agreed to convey this withering information to the claimanant (she would “make time” tomorrow to do so).  I cannot but think she thought she was doing us a favour. Perhaps I interrupted her employment. I tried insisting that the facts (which she reitereated she did not want to hear) spoke for themselves without the approbation or involvement of any other person. Her detachment from injury spoke not to her polite reserve but only to her unfettered determination to obfuscate.

This unfulfilling encounter followed months of similarly repeated road blocks. Every effort previously made through the local constituency office has failed to do anything except what was accomplished today – which is nothing. Instead we have time and again, at each step we make, endured only a folly of futile excuses why either we cannot access the government or why the government cannot respond to us. Never was there attention to resolution.

The Business Integration Services mandate is to develop, implement and manage payment programs and access to OHIP insured services, while fostering health services accountability and performance through the application of governing legislation, regulation and policy.

The mandate of Business Integration Services is a perfect deceit.  It is utterly contrary to the reception I had today. Reading between the lines the object is clear. You will forgive my bluntness but anything else is codswallop.

Surviving unaccommodation of this calculated nature is regrettably the manner to which we have become accustomed. While the staff of government offices has extraordinary captial upon which to rely, the narrownness of interest reduces the resource to mere dust.