A Billing Code

There is now a version of the conversation that is being invoiced. Not inside A.A. — outside it, where the hour a sober alcoholic spends with a struggling alcoholic is given a code and a rate, so that somewhere a third party can be billed for it. Watch what the mechanism does, because it needs no villain. The moment the hour is billable, the payer needs to know what happened in it, so the hour acquires paperwork. The paperwork needs goals, so the hour acquires a curriculum. The rate needs justifying, so the hour acquires outcomes — and the outcomes belong to whoever pays, which is never the drunk. Nothing about the two people in the room has changed, and everything about the hour has: it answers upward now. A.A. put its refusal of all this into one line of P-43, its pamphlet on the Traditions: "The meaning of Twelfth Step work cannot be measured in money" — because what actually changes hands in that hour is "of far greater worth — our very lives." A price does not simply pay for the hour. It measures it, and a measured hour ends up serving whoever holds the ruler. The free hour serves the man who needs it, because it cannot serve anything else.