Aren't we both using our imagination about things beyond our personal experience Ron?

And in saying stuff like "NYC is not a slime pit that treats visitors horribly as a rule" you are going way beyond what anyone has suggested to be the case.

In this case a crisis which could on the face of it have been sorted out perfectly easily and satisfactorily with a bit of common sense was apparently dealt with in a bureaucratic and clumsy way. Fortunately no major harm was done. However in the process some hard questions have been raised about about the quality of some of the basic services in one city in the USA.

Analogous things could have happened in other places, including here in the UK,and that might have shown up analogous failings. But circumstances differ from one place to another, and so do the way people respond to these circumstances.

And there's really no need to get too worked up about any of this. Nobody is saying anything like New York is "a slime pit that treats visitors horribly as a rule". In fact the closest anyone has got to saying that was perhaps Ron, when he wrote "our health care sucks and social services suck and hospitals suck". I'd say of out health and social services that they are a good way short of what they should be - maybe that actually means a similar level of criticism.