One of the more delightful innovations of the Obama era was the requirement that every full-time employee—or taxpayer, I don’t know—has to provide proof of “health insurance offering and coverage” when filing their taxes. It’s called a 1095-C form. The employer provides it to you, the employee, and you file it with your taxes.

The 1095-C form is yet one more way that Americans show to the world our pitch-perfect sense of how to waste time while pretending to do something good. Instead of having the government provide everyone with healthcare or health insurance, our leaders and experts come up with some sort of nudge that somehow or another is supposed to get us somehow closer to some group of people having some sort of access to some sort of coverage for some sort of healthcare—all the while doing nothing but forcing people to fill out more forms.

That’s the baseline of our country’s distinctive combination of sadism and tomfoolery.

But now comes along that bit of extra, which is so expressive of our moment. Where CUNY used to provide us with the 1095-C form—we’d get in the mail and file it with our taxes—some genius somewhere in the institution decided that it would be smarter and more efficient and save money and time for everyone to subcontract the providing of this one form to a private company.

Wait, it gets better.

Back in early February, all of us got a very strange and fishy-looking email from someone claiming to be an employee at CUNY, an email out of nowhere, from no apparent office at CUNY, saying that we had to register at some company or some website called bencorpaca, where we would provide company codes, social security numbers, passwords, the whole nine yards.

Obviously most people thought the email was one of the ten thousand phishing scams that we get every day at CUNY, despite our having ten thousand spam filters and twenty thousand passwords requiring thirty thousand verification codes and other security processes.

So the next day, after getting this initial suspicious-looking email, we get a follow-up email from the institution saying, “Many people have inquired regarding the legitimacy of the email received from the University Benefits Office this afternoon with the subject ‘ACA 1095C Tax Information.’ This email is legitimate and was validated with the sender at CUNY.”

In other words, click on the link you were sent, register with this new company, just so you can get one form—one fucking piece of paper, called a 1095-C, which was mandated by the Obama administration in order to, sort of, nudge people to, sort of, well you know the rest of the drill.

So today I go through this whole process. I click on the link. I enter the company code provided to me. I enter the last four digits of my social. And my email address. A new link is sent to me—so that I can sign up for the service that CUNY has subcontracted out to someone, in order to save time and money, in order to create efficiencies and synergies of scale—to sign up for the new service, come up with a new password, click this, waive that, sign this, so that, lo and behold, I can be told this: “No forms available. You will receive notification when your Form is available.”

It’s March 14. I wanted to finish filing my taxes this weekend. But now I wait. Because of…

Internet. Email. Links. Portals. Forms. Passwords. Obamacare. Efficiency. Nudges. Savings. Improvement. Progress. Better. Bullshit.