I received a letter in the mail from Sen. Byron Dorgan yesterday. Out of all three ND Congressmen, I’m surprised Dorgan replied. He’s not up for re-election, so he’s a free man. He could run naked through the halls of Congress and not worry about it.

Whatever the case, this letter was in response to some recent contact with his office over health care. You can click on the image in this post to see a larger version, and tell me if it answers anything I raised in my initial contact with his office.

I don’t think that it does.

For one thing, it seems to be about Blue Cross Blue Shield. Whoever wrote the letter assumed I had insurance with BCBS, which I haven’t had as an insurer since I switched companies after turning 30 in 2004. Interestingly enough, back then I had written a blog post about my experiences with BCBS upon turning 30 years old, a post which led me to be the top Google search listing for “blue cross blue shield sucks.”

So no, I’m not with BCBS.

But thank you, Random Dorgan Office Staffer, for writing as if I were.

Secondly, the letter from Sen. Dorgan’s office is trying to tell me, a member of the Idiot Constituency But We Still Want Your Vote, that no, the new healthcare law had nothing to do with it. It is trying to tell me that I am mistaken, that I don’t know what I am talking about.

No, I am not mistaken, as nice as it is to be told that my problem is still my problem but that I don’t understand the nature of it.

I want to again state that the letter that came from my insurance company that I blogged about this past month — an insurance company that did periodically incrementally raise my premium but suddenly jacked it up very high — clearly stated that the reason this was happening was because of the new laws.

Whether or not the insurance company was using the new law as an excuse to get money is not my point. My point is that the new healthcare law that was passed was the reason this occurred. The argument is not whether they really had to do it or not to comply, but the fact that it was happening, either through opportunistic behavior or because of necessity, due to the passage of the new healthcare law.

Which Sen. Byron Dorgan voted for.

Hence my earlier contact of his office.

And hence the annoyance that taxpayers have to pay for these stupid generic letters that get mailed out that don’t apply, as well as for the salary of the person who wrote them. On the plus side, I do like getting mail.

I’m going to return the favor. It goes out in the mail today.