September 2019 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Dealing with health insurance companies

the patient gets impatient

health insurance card I know you’ve been asking, “Roger, what have you been doing since you’ve retired?” Besides doing some arts stuff and going to Indiana, of course.

Mostly dealing with health insurance companies, and one in particular. When I was working, my family and I had insurance under my name. I received a letter dated June 25 from The Insurance Company (TIC) that my coverage would terminate as of July 1, which I knew to be correct. And finally, on July 1, I received separate cards for my wife and my daughter, who are still covered.

But about July 10, I got a letter from TIC insurance broker saying that the three of us were covered under my old number. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with TIC telling them that was incorrect. They blamed my former employer for the snafu. The benefits person at my old job said it was TIC’s fault. Still, ten days later, I get a letter stating my coverage was canceled. Good.

A week and a half after that, I get a letter from TIC welcoming me – and only me – to their service. This time I just called the work benefits person, who, by that time, feigned that she wasn’t bored hearing from me AGAIN. And two weeks later, I got my third TIC cancellation letter.

In late August, the office of my allergist, who I’d seen earlier in the month, called to say that Medicare, who they correctly billed, believes I’m still covered by TIC! I am to call the Medicare Coordination of Benefits people to straighten this out.

Of course, the Medicare COB phone number was not working. I called the main Medicare number and waited ONLY ten minutes. I explained my tale of woe. They removed my TIC coverage from their health insurance records. My allergist’s office knows to resubmit the claim in another two weeks.

None of this is especially difficult. But I get impatient doing thrice things I thought I needed to do only once.

Alexander Hamilton: “Just you wait”

the world turned upside-down

By our calculations, my family has listened to the original cast recording of the musical Hamilton a minimum of 250 times in the past four years. This is not an exaggeration, and for my daughter, who had it on REPEAT as she went to bed, probably a vast undercount.

She knew/knows all the actors in the original cast and which roles they played. She has books, pictures, calendars about that production. For her part, my wife has finished the lengthy Ron Chernow book that Lin-Manuel Miranda read which eventually led to the musical.

We’ve watched Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance at the White House Poetry Jam Writer on May 12, 2009, accompanied by Alex Lacamoire. This was Six Years Before the Play Hit the Broadway Stage.

We’ve seen, more than once, Hamilton’s America which debuted on October 21, 2016 as part of PBS’s “Great Performances”. We viewed the Tonys when the pop culture Broadway phenomenon won 11 of the 16 Tony Awards® for which it was nominated.

The creators received a special award at the Kennedy Center Honors. We’ve listened to the Weird Al parody.

And around Albany, NY, in particular, there’s the Hamilton Effect, with several sites of significance to him and especially the Schuylers, the family he married into. The Albany Institute of History and Art has an exhibit The Schuyler Sisters and Their Circle right now.

By coincidence, the Park Playhouse in Albany staged a production of In the Heights in July, Miranda’s FIRST Tony-winning musical. My wife and I enjoyed the show, puzzled by a local critic’s dis of the lead’s performance.

When we knew that Hamilton was coming to Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady, we bought three tickets each for the six shows in the package, back in May of 2018. (We had purchased two season ticket the year before, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch.) We weren’t going to throw away our shot at seeing the show. The wait seemed interminable.

Finally, it’s H-day, August 18. My wife switches out her purse because large, non-clear ones are banned.

For a piece I already know so well, will it be as enjoyable as I anticipated? The answer is an enthusiastic YES. This in spite of the fact that they used a standby, Wonza Johnson, usually played by Edred Utomi, for the title role.

My buddy Amy Biancolli wrote on Facebook: “It’s more than a musical. It’s an opera and a ballet and a discourse on grief and a thrilling, epic poem on the arc and nature of history. And it’s hilarious. And mesmerizing. And infectious. And moving.”

I did learn there are a few spoken-word bits in the story. My wife picked up on some plot points. I don’t think I cried more than three or four times. I’m convinced that understanding the libretto beforehand enhances the appreciation of the story. Even before the performance, Hamilton has been firmly lodged in my Top Five favorite musicals, along with West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof.

Renoir: “a hedonist’s dreamland”

Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow

Renoir.Clark Art My wife and I went to the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, MA. We’d surely been there at least a couple times before, though I don’t seem to have mentioned it in ye olde blogge.

The featured display was Renoir: The Body, The Senses. As the description notes: “From the late 1860s and early 1870s when he attempted to find fame at the Salon, through his Impressionist phase, and until his final years working steadfastly in the south of France, Renoir returned repeatedly, almost obsessively, to the subject of the body—clothed, certainly, but especially nude.”

And it wasn’t just his work, but that of his contemporaries such as Manet and Monet. While I wasn’t formally part of the tour, I listened in to one of the guides. She gave me a greater appreciation of the techniques used in the paintings, some of which are deteriorating somewhat. The display will be up until September 22.

We also viewed Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow. Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe (1889–1961) had some talent. More interesting, though, were the relationships. Georgia actively discouraged the artistic ambitions of Ida and their sister Catherine. Catherine abided by Georgia’s wishes; Ida did not.

Earlier, Ida often visited Georgia and Georgia’s husband Alfred Stieglitz. He took several photos of Ida, and it is thought that Alfred had a non-reciprocated flirtation with his sister-in-law. Ida once noted that she too could have been more famous if she had “a Stieglitz,” someone to promote her. The Ida O’Keeffe show is up through October 14.

My friend David Brickman discussed both of these displays HERE.

Then we did what we had never done. We went on a tour of the original building from the 1950s with two young women as our guides, one who just graduated from Williams College, and the other an incoming junior. It is an eclectic mix that reflected the taste of art collector Robert Sterling Clark and his wife, Francine.

The docents noted that during the Cold War, the Clarks worried about the safety of their artworks. Anticipating a possible attack on New York City, where they lived, they started looking at sites in rural New York and Massachusetts in order to found a museum for their art in a less vulnerable location.

Admission to the Clark Art Institute is $20, but free to students and those under 18. Since we have a card that reflects a reciprocal arrangement with a library in Albany, the visit was free. Last time, I bought some books; maybe I will next trip as well.

The title of this piece is from a Wall Street Journal review.

The I states: IA, IL, IN, oh, and ID

The Second City is now third

I map — Created / Published: New York, Published by G. Woolworth Colton; agent, Chicago, Rufus Blanchard, 1858. From the Library of Congress.

An interesting thing to me: of the four of them, three of the I states, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, are in a line, east to west. I had been to NONE of them in the 20th century. OK, I rode a train through Indiana in 1998, and I had been to Chicago, Illinois’ O’Hare airport a few times. But I never counted those.

Then in 2008, I made it to Chicago, for real, which I wrote about HERE. That was state #30 I visited. And in 2019, I made it to West Lafayette, IN, making the tally 31. At this rate, I’ll have visited every state by the year 2228.

ID Idaho Abbreviation is first two letters The usual traditional shorter version was Ida. My great aunt’s sister was named Ida. Capital and largest city: Boise. It’s in two time zones, Mountain (primarily) and Pacific.
That B-52’s song Private Idaho is irrationally stuck in my head.

IL Illinois Abbreviation is first two letters, traditional version is Ill., which is kind of sick.
Capital: Springfield, home of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
Largest city: Chicago, which used to be referred to as Second City – thus SCTV – because it was the second-largest city in the US, but now it’s third, after New York City and Los Angeles.
Arthur pointed out recently that this season was the centennial of the Red Summer, a painful picture of America’s racist past.
Here’s Chicago by Frank Sinatra.

IN Indiana Abbreviation is the first two letters, traditionally Ind.
Capital and largest city: Indianapolis.
Here’s a Wikipedia factoid: “As of 2013 Indiana has produced more National Basketball Association (NBA) players per capita than any other state. Muncie has produced the most per capita of any American city, with two other Indiana cities in the top ten… The 1986 film Hoosiers” – which is very good – “is inspired by the story of the 1954 Indiana state champions Milan High School.”
Vice-President, and former Indiana governor Mike Pence has been feuding with South Bend, IN mayor, and Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (pronounced like it’s spelled).
Strange song on a Motown label: Indiana Wants Me – R. Dean Taylor

IA Iowa First and last letters in the abbreviation, which is the traditional abbreviation, if people bothered to shorten it at all.
Capital and largest city: Des Moines.
The state gets outsized attention because it holds the first presidential caucus in the country, even before the first primary, which is in New Hampshire. Gatherings of voters select delegates to the state conventions.
The Iowa State Fair claims to be the inspiration for a novel and three movies. It is home to the world-famous Butter Cow, weighing about 600 pounds and standing 5.5 feet tall.
Here are a bunch of songs about the Hawkeye State.

For ABC Wednesday

Labor Day: unions; corporate greed

eating a salad isn’t going to fix the systemic problems at your workplace

unions.afl-cio.2013 It’s Labor Day, my first not working in a very long time. Among other things, I was thinking about unions. To the best of my recollection, I have never belonged to one. Yet I have been a big fan of them.

“The early labor movement was… inspired by more than the immediate job interest of its craft members. It harbored a conception of the just society, deriving from… the republican ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered social equality, celebrated honest labor, and relied on an independent, virtuous citizenship.”

Organized labor unions have “fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement led efforts to stop child labor, give health benefits and provide aid to workers who were injured or retired.”

One of the conclusions I’ve come to as a former business librarian is that when ownership/management treats workers equitably, the need/desire for unions declines significantly. I have been aware of employees who were offered membership in a union but declined because the benefits seemed fair.

On the other hand, I have some knowledge of the formation of two unions. Both are in Albany, created in the past quarter-century, and both were as a result of the churlishness of management.

In other labor news, I’ve read that the immigration crackdown is targeting labor protections. “Undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, but the administration has quietly eroded protections within a federal program for immigrants who come forward to report labor trafficking, sexual harassment and other forms of abuse. The administration is also attempting to crush a union representing immigration judges.”

Truthout says The Answer to Burn Out at Work Isn’t “Self-Care” — It’s Unionizing. “It’s true that healthy food, exercise, and sleep are important ways to deal with stress, and we could all use more of each. But eating a salad isn’t going to fix the systemic problems at your workplace.”

1 in 4 Americans works for a federal contractor. The regime is proposing to drop protections for LGBTQ employees. “Their latest proposed regulation out of the Department of Labor” adds “unprecedented religious exemptions to a long-standing executive order prohibiting discrimination against the employees of federal contractors that includes protections added by President Obama for sexual orientation and gender identity.” His successor promised to keep this order “intact,” but he’s gone back on his word.

Top executives are now earning 278 times more than the average American worker, up from a ratio of 58-to-1 in 1989. A new study, released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows CEO pay has grown more than 1,000% since 1978.

Pay for average workers, though, grew just 12% in the same time period. America’s chief executive officers were paid $17.2 million on average in 2018. Corporate greed is eviscerating the working class.