Written and edited by Norm Scott:
EDUCATE! ORGANIZE!! MOBILIZE!!!
Three pillars of The Resistance – providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers. We link up with bands of resisters. Nothing will change unless WE ALL GET INVOLVED IN THE STRUGGLE!
Norm goes deep into #MulgrewCare: appears on Podcast, Lander Says NO to MulgrewCare, Ravages of our profit-making medical system
I went to one of my doctors yesterday and he's trying to pressure me into taking an expensive test I clearly don't need. The naked profit motive. Medicare will pay but I'm conscious of how that undermines Medicare in the long run. I'd be acting like Mulgrew. I won't do it. In the podcast I delve into the ideology of the UFT/Unity caucus that leads to decisions like pushing MulgrewCare and also 20 years ago, privatized education like charters.
the advertising, the television commercials, the hamburger
sliders, the endless catered lunches, the agency money, the plane
tickets to Europe — are all, directly or not, contributing to this
enormous cost.” --- This is what Mulgew supports.
Worth the listen! Norm Scott unpacks the failed attempt by@UFTUnity to privatize retiree Medicare with Mulgrewcare
@NormScott1has been a tireless union activist & once again proving his mettle in helping to lead organize our petition campaign.
Nice words from my UFC colleagues.
What a pleasure to Zoom meet Noah who interviewed me for his Professional Development: The New York City Teacher Podcast Monday night. He certainly does his research and the hour spent talking to a young NYC teacher was a pleasure - and I just signed up as a patron to get all his podcasts. He has been doing it since July and I am addicted, catching up on back issues. I first heard his of him with his Nick Bacon interview on the Feb. DA which was excellent: Ep 29- What REALLY Happened at the February DA.mp3
Hey Norm,
The show is up and ready to be heard! It can be found at the following locations (among others):
This week Norm Scott, a retired NYC DOE teacher, long-time unionist, and blogger, stops by to tell us all about Mulgrewcare, a foiled (or is it?) attempt by the UFT leadership to deprive retirees of their proper, hard-earned benefits OR balance the books after a poorly-executed contract negotiation by collecting their hard-earned money in the form of new, illegal premiums for the same coverage they have always had. We discuss the parallels between Unity's willingness to privatize healthcare and the neoliberal drive to privatize schools, most notably via the charter movement, and much more!
This week Norm Scott, a retired NYC DOE teacher, long-time unionist, and
blogger, stops by to tell us all about Mulgrewcare, a foiled (or is
it?) attempt by the UFT leadership to deprive retirees of their proper,
hard-earned benefits OR balance the books after a poorly-executed
contract negotiation by collecting their hard-earned money in the form
of new, illegal premiums for the same coverage they have always had. We
discuss the parallels between Unity's willingness to privatize
healthcare and the neoliberal drive to privatize schools, most notably
via the charter movement, and much more! Read more of Norm's work at ednotesonline.com
Emphasizing the cruelty of Mulgrew in opposing true cost-saving solutions to costs of medical services by favoring profit making private insurance and degrading the public options.
"survived the ongoing catastrophe of for-profit
medical care.... a
ready solution to the problem — which, Maloney implies, is inseparable
from the very structures of capitalism."
And one thing we know- in the 60 years of Unity Caucus leadership of the UFT, unmitigated support for the unfettered outrages of capitalism
NYT Book Review By Sarah Manguso
COST OF LIVING
Essays
By Emily Maloney
The
illness narrative, ending in financial ruin and decreased quality of
life, has become one of the classic 21st-century American stories. In
her debut essay collection, Emily Maloney documents the complex
intersections of money, illness and medicine. For Maloney, the primary
experience of receiving health care is not merely a bodily or spiritual
event but always, also, a financial one. She understands on a granular
level the relationship of money to being ill, to developing a drug, to
housing and caring for patients and, of course, to managing an
unfathomable amount of debt. Her broad perspective is hard won; at
different times she has been a multiply diagnosed chronically ill
patient, an E.M.T., an emergency room medical technician, a drug rep, a
data analyst, a medical writer, a medical debtor and an American citizen
who has — so far — survived the ongoing catastrophe of for-profit
medical care.
The precipitating event
in “Cost of Living” is the author’s psychiatric hospitalization at 19:
“It wasn’t that I had wanted to die, exactly. It was more that I just
couldn’t keep living.” Maloney’s choice of a nearby, independent
hospital’s emergency room over the bigger university hospital “where the
state might pick up your bill if you were declared indigent” leads to
the crushing debt at the heart of the book. “Sitting on a cot in the
emergency room, I filled out paperwork certifying myself as the
responsible party for my own medical care — signed it without looking,
anchoring myself to this debt, a stone dropped in the middle of a
stream. This debt was the cost of living.”
As
Maloney pries deeper into the machine of American health care, she
finds no central mechanism other than that of the eternal
money-go-round. By the time she gets to the conference at which doctors
are painstakingly comped for their attendance at brunches with “soggy
pastries” amid “transfer of value” concerns, I had lost all hope for a
ready solution to the problem — which, Maloney implies, is inseparable
from the very structures of capitalism.
Each
essay documents a different kind of structural failure, caused or
complicated by capital and inevitably ending in harm to patients. In
one, Maloney is prescribed 26 psychiatric medications for what turns out
to be a vitamin D deficiency, hypothyroidism and a neurologically based
developmental disorder. In another, as an E.R. tech she is trained to
“bill up” — increasing charges if at all possible — but she secretly
perfects the occult art of minimizing patient cost without tripping any
corporate alarms.
Embedding
herself into various corners of the bureaucratic medical machine,
Maloney describes everyone she encounters with the same perspicacity.
“There’s a fine line between a pain patient and a drug addict,” she
writes, “and sometimes patients go back and forth across it.” “Elizabeth
… was what we called a frequent flier, someone who was unable to make
sense of the world she lived in and so she came to us instead, a kind of
tent revival in our suburban hospital, for healing.” A medical student,
meanwhile, is “a strange mix of sweaty and cavalier.”
Thanks
to her experiences, Maloney is able to see the cracks in what a less
informed patient might experience, simply, as care: “At my doctor’s
office for a masked annual physical, my internist depression screens me.
I know it’s because Epic, the online medical record system he uses,
prompts him to do so. Northwestern Medicine is part of a program that
uses an installation of Epic that depression screens everyone.”
While
working as a medical publications manager at a pharmaceutical company,
where she becomes a part of the conference circuit for the first time,
she is struck by the sheer scale of the apparatus. “Yes, the research
everyone does is important. Yes, the work to take a drug from
preclinical stages to the market is huge and hugely expensive. But the
rest — the advertising, the television commercials, the hamburger
sliders, the endless catered lunches, the agency money, the plane
tickets to Europe — are all, directly or not, contributing to this
enormous cost.”
Maloney’s essays read
as if they were begun in low light, with little sense of where they were
going or how far. They start with a question and work things out on the
page. They don’t seem concerned about arriving at a grand unified
theory of anything. They notice everything and have nothing to prove.
They don’t prematurely grasp at an ending. These qualities combine to
elevate this collection far above the usual first-person essayistic
fare. The challenges of Maloney’s background — familial trauma, poor
medical care, occasional indigence — form part of the back story, but
they are ultimately beside the point of this book. Her broad authority
and the quality of the prose — astute, compassionate and lethally funny —
are what make these essays remarkable. Maloney is an exceptionally
alert writer on whom nothing is lost, who sees everything with
excruciating clarity, including the unassailable fact that in this
country, there is currently no tidy passage through the interconnected
quagmires of illness, money and care.
Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books, most recently the novel “Very Cold People.”
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