I’ve written before about how everything right now is designed to make you give up, lie down and quit fighting, and of course twas ever thus for those we nice white people didn’t want participating in the system, but increasingly we are weaponizing our customer service systems against ourselves: 

Elizabeth Cloinger, 47, who lives in a trailer next to her cousin’s house just outside town, thought she was complying with the new rules. She has been on Medicaid for years and already had a job, working seven days most weeks as a home health aide. Her wages — 9.25 an hour, with 50 cents more for hospice patients — and her hours met the new rules. Yet she received a June letter saying she needed to verify that her income made her eligible, or she would be cut off.

She called the listed phone number and faxed information to a state employee in Pine Bluff. She was told that, like many people, she was exempt from the work requirements — in her case, because she was caring for her 20-year-old daughter recovering from a car accident and her 3-year-old granddaughter.

But on Aug. 18, she received another letter, saying she had been terminated because she had not verified her income. In December, four letters arrived saying she needed to update her email address, then 11 more in January. Each letter told her to create an online account. She doesn’t have a computer and didn’t realize that the program requires everyone to get an email address.

A federal judge struck down these requirements recently, but of course they’ll come back, and of course the GOP and some MY BRAND IS CENTRIST Democrats will keep trying to make the poor prove they’re poor, the disabled prove they’re disabled, and everybody having a hard time will be forced to perform that hard time for the public to make us all feel better or something.

The point is to get people to give up and die already. It’s to exhaust them, the way endless appeals to insurance companies and run-arounds and “log in to your account except you need an account to log in” mechanisms are designed to do so. The point is to make people who have a limited capacity to fight struggle even harder. The point is to be mean.

And to who? To people who take care of the elderly in nursing homes and hospices, for ten goddamn dollars an hour. Hospice workers are angels on this earth and should be paid like star quarterbacks, this is already disgusting, and here come our National Scolds to make things worse. As if someone who works in a nursing home has to prove anything to anybody. If these lawmakers had to empty even one bedpan they’d faint from exertion.

I will never understand — as a person who, full disclosure, paid a healthy amount of taxes last year for the first time in my adult life — what I am supposed to get out of punishing people like that. Atrios says all the time that the health care system can be wildly complicated and expensive on the back end but should be absolutely free and simple on the front end and I absolutely agree but for EVERYTHING.

Yeah, people are gonna game the system. Somebody’s gonna be a welfare queen. Get the hell over it. If the choice is between “a system that can be gamed but hospice nurses get paid and can see a doctor themselves” and “a system that nobody can game WHICH IS IMAGINARY and is also a huge pain in the ass for the people who literally care for the dying and drives such people into poverty” I will gladly, enthusiastically accept the former.

A.