At a recent community meeting, Smoky Mountain higher-ups fielded questions on the LME/MCO’s decision to limit the number of providers eligible for public funding. In the ideal world, government would have nothing to do with counseling and psychiatric services. But even I can see we have a lot of people with emotional burdens who cannot afford professional shrinks. Nobody cares what I have to say, so I take the easy way out and pawn them off on government. I acknowledge the error of my ways. But until we fix things, the basic tenet of increasing choice should apply here as elsewhere.

Here is what those defending the decision had to tell the audience about the magnificent perfection of their points of view. I hope the Mountain Xpress higher-ups will forgive me for quoting so liberally from their fine coverage. Said one:

Smoky is committed to having a relationship and partnership with you. . . . It’s all about how we do this together, the giving and the taking. It’s no different in a personal relationship than it is in a relationship with an organization, the media and its partners, even when we agree to disagree. . . . I know many times the decisions we make are not always understood. . . . But we are committed to transparency and honesty, so we hope to have a conversation today through question and answer. . . . We have months to complete these transitions, not weeks. . . . We’re committed to making sure not to lose anyone in the process.

Said another:

What we’ve done this year is what we do every year. We simply made choices about the continuation of certain services with certain providers. . . . We’re not doing anything to decrease access. . . . Whenever we make a decision to no longer contract with a provider for a service, we have a very diligent process around how consumers are linked to the same service or other services, so there’s nothing about any decision we would make about contracting that would reduce access.

I don’t see how this strategy is going to help paranoiacs or codependents so shot-down they can’t make their own decisions. The moral of the story, though, is when words with no meaning fail, doublespeak them.