Thanks Ontario Healthcare 2024-08-04

Here in Ontario we have a form of universal health care. The good news is that if you are dying, they'll generally try to fix you without having to worry about whether or not you qualify as rich. The bad news is that sometimes you have to wait a long time when you go to the emergency room, in fact in some cases the emergency room is closed and you have to take an ambulance ride to another town or city. My story today is about trying to get a FIT test. A FIT test is where the Ontario government (actually a lab contracted by the Ontario government) sends you a test kit in the mail, you smear turd on it and then mail it back to them, and they test it for signs of blood which may indicate the presence of cancer. They send letters (yes, good old paper) to Ontario residents over the age of 50 and tell you to contact Health811 to get a kit. You'll notice that link is at ontario.ca which is owned by the Ontario government... more on that soon.

The letter I received says I should contact my "family doctor or nurse practitioner" to ask for the FIT test. That is cute and all, but getting a family doctor in Ontario has been a bit of a joke for a couple of decades now. Getting a family doctor that isn't shuffling through humans like an OHIP¹ speed run is a whole other joke. Towards the bottom of the letter it says that if you do not have a family doctor or nurse practitioner you can call Health811 at 811. Too bad that doesn't work from a voip phone. I did a search for Health811 and found them at the link above, and expected they would be directly related to the Ontario government. I mean, in what universe would it make sense to have the Ontario government hosting web site content from someone else? Unfortunately they offer only the 811 phone number and a chat widget on their web site. I hate those chat things, but at this point it was my only option (aside from going out and buying a TTY machine to call their 1-866 number). The good news is that their chat crap isn't powered by the magic of AI. It IS powered by a US corporation that has offices in over a dozen countries all over the world, but not Canada. Thanks for sharing the information about my colonic healthcare you wankers... I'm sure they would never get hacked, that never happens to big rich corporations. Anyways, I did eventually get told (via the chat thingy) that my FIT test should show up in the mail. I was then asked to fill out a feedback survey, and given a link to satmetrix.com which of course is also owned by nice.com and allows companies (or governments) to "Unlock actionable insights from omnichannel feedback"... ugh, wankers.

Uhhm, you guys are wankers.

Okay, so this crap [pun intended] happens all the time, why am I so bent about it? Well, I think it sucks that essentially every corporate whorehouse does this stuff. They outsource whatever they can, they give zero turds [pun intended] about the supply chain of that outsourcing, service suffers, and nobody gets to bitch because "that's just how it is chump". It sucks that we all get to slide in to the muck, it is the fault of all of us, and yet we collectively couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. It IS our choice... and the choice we are making is a clear sign we suck. :-(

[1] Ontario Health Insurance Plan