Un lungo reportage pubblicato su ProPublica indaga il sistema di riscossione dei crediti – e il potere dei relativi esattori – nel piccolo comune di Coffeyville, in Kansas, dove il tasso di povertà è pari al doppio della media nazionale e oltre la metà dell’ammontare complessivo dei debiti risulta sia stata contratta dai cittadini nel campo dei servizi medico-sanitari. Le persone maggiormente indebitate, sostiene l’autrice, Lizzie Presser, sarebbero anche quelle più malate, e le modalità di esazione, secondo Peter Holland (ex direttore della Consumer Protection Clinic alla University of Maryland Law School), uno degli intervistati, solleverebbero finanche questioni di carattere costituzionale.

The first time Tres Biggs was arrested, in 2008, he was dove hunting in a grove outside Coffeyville. It had been just a year since his 6-year-old son Lane was diagnosed with leukemia, and Biggs watched him breathe in the fresh air, seated on a haybale under an orange sky. When a game warden came through to check hunting permits, Biggs’ friends scattered and hid. He wasn’t the running type, and he took Lane by the hand. The warden ran Biggs’ license. There was a warrant out for his arrest. Biggs asked a friend to take Lane home and crouched into the warden’s truck, scouring his memory for some misstep.

The last few years had been a blur. His wife, Heather, had quit her job as a babysitter to care for their son. Then, she got sick. Some days, she passed out or felt so dizzy she couldn’t leave her bed. Her doctors didn’t know if the attacks were linked to her heart condition, in which blood flowed backward through a valve. To provide for his wife, son and two other kids, Biggs worked two jobs, at a lumber yard and on construction sites. He didn’t know when he would have had time to commit a crime. He’d never been to jail. As he stared out the window at the rolling hills, his face began to sweat. He felt his skin tighten around him and wondered if he would be sick.

The warrant, he learned at the jailhouse, was for failure to appear in court for an unpaid hospital bill. Coffeyville Regional Medical Center had sued him in 2006 for $2,146, after one of Heather’s emergency visits; neither of his jobs offered health insurance. In the shuffle of 70-hour workweeks and Lane’s chemotherapy, he had missed two consecutive court dates. He was fingerprinted, photographed, made to strip and told to brace himself for a tub of delousing liquid. His bail was set at $500 cash; he had about $50 to his name.

In foto  “L’ ufficio delle tasse” di Pieter Brueghel il Giovane. Fonte: Wikimedia.