Signpost after a tough winter: What may be ahead (i.e., is more and less likely)

[Edits 3/3/14, including important between asterisks. Edits 3/6/14. Edit 3/27/14.]

I’m pleased to see I got as far as I did with the blog plans I outlined last December here and here. But I want to clarify what I plan to continue pursuing, and what I don’t, and what is in a sort of “development limbo” and may still eventually see the light of day, blog-wise.

For an explanation of the codes “JCP” and “RVT” (which imply that an alternative or fuller version of the relevant theme may appear in the coded package), see early in this entry.

1. The GLG story: Its limited aim, somewhat like episodes I-III of Star Wars  [JCP]

Fortunately, I was able to at least meet minimal expectations for my “Dollars & sense” and “Running with the bulls” series. Work-situation stories always provide a lot of substance, but they start to get tough to finish, on this or my other blog. The reasons for this vary. In the case of Jason Aronson, the story was so old (20 years), and the type of work was so atypical of me in the past 20 years, that it took me some work—with the nature of this winter not helping entirely—to flesh out the story, and iron out the kinks. Fortunately, I have a fair amount of hard-copy evidence to go with this.

The “Running with the bulls” series, ending up not on a New Jersey firm but on the New York firm AM Medica, was good because—while I lacked a certain amount of hard-copy evidence—the memories of a crazy stint, like a crazy vacation, allowed me to pursue the story with some gusto and more fun than the Jason Aronson. As it happened, my time on it got stretched out—which ironically can help a series when the lengthy process allows details and nuances to filter in that flesh out the story usefully.

The GLG story is difficult in a couple ways: while I have hard-copy evidence (and earlier versions of the story, including on this blog), and while the sheer bizarreness of the situation behind it impels me to want to write it—and sheer emotional investment is a key spur to doing a good blog entry—there is something a little forbidding about it for me at the moment.

Let me note what the GLG story will NOT entail. Although this story would bring me, in simple historical terms, to the very threshold of talking about my experience with the medical-promo firm CommonHealth as it occurred within 2007-10 (which tends to be significantly different in character from my experience with it of 2001-06), I want to hold off on discussing that firm, except for a small but important way in rounding off the GLG story. As to detailing my experience with CommonHealth—which I’ve done on this blog already—there certainly remain some stories, but importantly I am holding off on delivering stories on this firm, including the last *(Part 6)* of my “What in the Name of Medicine?” series, because there are other avenues I am dealing with this, which are pending and more appropriate than a blog entry or two.

The GLG story will basically conclude (1) with what happened between me and it alone in 2007; and (2) with some looks at a number of medical-promo firms it had as clients, with my saying just enough about these latter to explain what happened with GLG in 2006-07 (and in one way, in early 2007 CommonHealth was downright constructive with me regarding how GLG started foundering).

The limitedness of the GLG story is, in a sense, explainable with a Star Wars analogy (not that I am a fan of that movie series). You could consider the overall collection of my medical-promo stories that deal with the years of 2007-10 to be like episodes IV through VI in Star Wars (starting, on the movie side of the analogy, with what originally was the first Star Wars movie [1977], followed by The Empire Strikes Back [1980] and Return of the Jedi [1983]). My GLG story, which more or less covers experience from 2004 to 2007 (while an additional brief look back to my dealings with Horizon Graphics, starting as long ago as 1994, is relevant), will be like episodes I through III. In marching up to what happened in 2007, my account will be like seeing Anakin Skywalker earn his dark stripes as he becomes Darth Vader, donning the helmet and the James Earl Jones voice—you know, populating his early career with stuff like the Checkers speech and the loss of the governor’s race in California in 1962, but without an association with Jar-Jar Binks (sorry to mix metaphors).

If you understand that the GLG story has this rigidly enforced terminus, then you need not worry whether I open a back door onto what I already have taken a tour through in a way that may be more than enough for some readers. Meanwhile, I think my GLG story is very valid, because—in revisiting something I already made a chronicle of, for those who could use it (in days, 2007, when it didn’t seem necessary to do this sort of thing yet)—reexamining it today for details (or possibilities) that I didn’t appreciate in 2007, and simply taking an approach of sheer curiosity and intrigue, could make for an edifying “war story” that is good for you as well as for me.

But it will take me some time to get into this. In a way it will be like chewing on a brick to get it into “digestible” shape for you.

2. Things put on indefinite hold, or to be (re)turned to eventually

The “Hillary” story

I had started talking about a projected entry tentatively titled “A tonic for when you’re ginned: The tale of ‘Hillary’ and the house fire,” which was noted within this entry. Pretty quickly I became reserved about delving into this. This topic came up in my plans as ancillary to the Kate Brex sub-series I did, which was part of the larger Democrats Part 7 sub-series on my other blog (“Missives from the Jersey Mountain Bear”). The Hillary story “in my archives” is actually related to the set of anecdotes in my manuscript A College Try that Courted Trouble, and yet it was such (given the problems of others that inspired it) that it had (after some years of gestation) become pretty much eliminated from that package (as a product to be offered in any sort of published form), though the Hillary story was not to be permanently kept from “other eyes.”

The reason why the Hillary story became tempting to talk about in relation to Kate is that Kate actually had a number of things to say about the pseudonymous Hillary, though these came up in 2004, two years after she saw Hillary in person when Kate covered a meeting of the NDMDA group in Sussex County for a feature story that was eventually published in The New Jersey Herald in June 2002. I appreciated Kate’s 2004 comments about Hillary in reviewing my old notes again.

Of all the women I helped extensively who came to the NDMDA rap meetings, Hillary was probably the most off-putting. Those I’ve pseudonymed Cheryl and Betty were more worthy of helping, and they did more to invite this; and my experience with them from October 2002 to about November 2003 certainly invited a lengthy treatment in a memoir I later wrote. But Hillary—who I dealt with primarily within the period from about January 2002 to about May 2002—was an odd duck even in NDMDA terms. She turned up at the lecture meeting in early June 2002 that Kate Brex covered, which lecture Kate wrote on in her news article. Kate incidentally witnessed enough about Hillary at the lecture meeting that, in 2004, she talked with me about her observations at some length. At the time, I was a little skeptical of her takes on (some) details, but when I reviewed notes on her comments in late 2013, I felt this area was worth a revisit.

Quite apart from what Kate was directly familiar with, Hillary was also involved in a house fire in later 2002, regarding which I talked to her (Hillary) on the phone in December 2002, which was the last time I ever spoke to her. There are other aspects of her overall story (to the limited extent I was aware of her doings) that make for a gripping sort of overall anecdote. Also, what made her especially “piquant” is that she inspired comments by others, including from Jean, the longtime leader of the NDMDA group in Sussex County (through fall 2002), who shared with me her concerns (in spring 2002) about Hillary’s possibly pursuing an extramarital affair with a male in the group (which indeed she did—and don’t worry, Hillary and her husband of the time eventually got divorced). [Important additions 3/3/14, 3/6/14: To give some perspective here, Hillary was about 38, while I was about 41 (the average age of the most frequent attendees there in 2002, and hence those most apt to be trustees for the group, was about 50), while the man Hillary had the affair with was about 30. Further, Hillary's touch was not subtle: she spoke in hard, angry terms about her issues with her husband, and in the close wake of this (though with an effort at being clandestine, leaving various group members in the dark about it), she pursued her affair with the younger man with as much resolve as lack of good taste. Also, to show how little a local health-care professional--who also happened to be popular among various of the group's attendees in their private consultations with her--had a grasp on things in this group: the psychiatrist I've pseudonymed Letty Greenstein, who gave a lecture to the group in June 2002, but by no means ran the group--nor was she ever a "professional advisor" for us, a professional liaison that NDMDA/DBSA groups tend to have--once said to me in a routine private consultation, when I briefly described the Hillary situation, that I was showing "guilt" in being apt to talk about the matter (while clearly I was not a party to the affair instigated by Hillary). If you review all I say in this subsection, you should agree that anyone who would say I was exhibiting "guilt" in talking about the Hillary situation was naive indeed, if not also showing a severe lack of common sense about what could go on with these groups, to say nothing of any sort of professional "responsibility" Dr. G might have exercised. By the way, Dr. Greenstein was never in a capacity to be a private doctor to Hillary, as far as I know.]  

Then—adding to what prodigious complications came from Hillary—certain people in the Sussex County NDMDA constellation, in spring 2003, would make such a massive issue out of how I had (in 2002) discussed Hillary outside the group—which, as I noted, Jean had initiated with me (on good grounds)—that this issue became the basis for a major plank in the positions from which I was forced from running the group (and stiffed money-wise) in May-June 2003. As you can see, on a number of counts (and from very different angles), there was a lot of “drama” that arose because of Hillary, and you (the reader new to this) could well be curious about her, for very valid reasons.

And in this regard, as well as in certain other (isolated) situations, Hillary indirectly represented how ridiculous these patient-run support groups could get sometimes (far from being—as they tended to be defined and under normal circumstances—anything quite professionally run).

In fact, I find from an Internet search that Hillary appears to be living again in Great Britain, where she came from. (Her accent when she was with the NDMDA group in 2002 was an odd blend of a British accent and a little California accent; she had lived in California just previously.) So, in effect, I wouldn’t be hurting her prospects much in talking about her (I don’t know whether she’s working at a paid job or not).

The stuff that Kate had to say about her in 2004—which I became appreciative of again in late 2013—showed that Hillary, who was not a terribly floridly behaved person (she had that British reserve, along with whatever else), could stir strong responses in all sorts of others (and sometimes others in their responses to her could clash among themselves over her). And I think Kate, who was well familiarized with how people tended to behave, or should behave, in support groups had her own good perspective for measuring Hillary’s behavior in June 2002.

All this said—and I’ve said more than I expected to—I hold off on the full Hillary story, because, though you might find it quite interesting, it is not something I want (in its details) to tailor to this blog, with the attendant risks, at this time.

The Kate story

In December, I got into the thicket of my memories and e-mail quotes from Kate Brex as I proceeded with my Dems series. If this “detour” struck you as a little excessive, no wonder, but it wasn’t for bad-faith reasons. I had started to look at Mark Hartmann’s story, which I found was a key piece in the Sussex Dems jigsaw-puzzle history of 1999-2005 or so. This inevitably led to a consideration of the less-than-stellar managing editor Dave Brown. And this, as I considered the history, made me turn to Kate Brex.

Initially, in telling what story I had on her, I was concerned about how (assuming she was alive and could see my blog) she might respond to my blog history about her. When I found she had passed on, this struck me like a jolt. And then I tried to round off the story—the process of which became murky and disturbing indeed—by determining what was worth revealing, and what not, in light of her being deceased (which included paying some “respect” to her awful experience of the lawsuit she was mired in in 2003-04). One thing that gave me a solid handle on this story is that, with my having experienced Dave Brown directly myself (in fall 2001), I could put faith in what she had reported to me as her problems with him that reflected his considerable lack of professionalism.

The last entry in the mini-series on Kate, subpart Z (which is posted, on my other blog), I have had qualms about, and I have considered revisiting it for several weeks now. I don’t think there’s any rush on that. One of the tricks with the Kate story is related to, or similar to, my “editorially dealing with” Kate’s “part” in the Hillary story: Kate’s comments of 2003 and 2004 were complex and demanding in their own right at the time, while she didn’t quite seek help from me as other people had (following general NDMDA-type parameters) in 2002 and 2003 (so there was a certain aloofness and “not-needy-ness” in her, which I’ve already addressed in the sub-series on her). But in reviewing her communications about 10 years later, I found there to be an interesting challenge, almost an art, to reading through our exchanges and deciding what comments of hers I would put stock in and what put less stock in.

A general reason why I felt it worthwhile to unfold the Kate story is that, on a general level, when someone has confided the mess of things in you that she did me, you look back and wonder, Could she have been better served? Not just by me, but by her attorneys? By her former employer? By anyone else? You feel almost as if you were witness to a vicious street mugging, and you did the best you could at the time, and you moved on with your life, as she did hers; and then looking at old records of that event, you consider in awe what happened here, and wonder if anyone, including yourself, might have helped her better.

That is why, for one thing, it simply wasn’t my only option just to keep quiet about it—quite apart from whatever “political points” modern onlookers might have seen me seeking to score in presenting the story (and actually, I was not expressly seeking to discredit The New Jersey Herald as it functions today, for political reasons or otherwise).

Important: if I edit or change the Kate story, it wouldn’t be to add more subparts, or to do major changes.

3. The last Democrats Part 7 entry

Yes, I still owe you one last installment of the Dems series, subpart G, probably to appear on my other blog. I never thought I wouldn’t do this. It will definitely be more compact than the Mark Hartmann and Kate mini-series—it should be one entry, if a bit long. And it will basically be a positive story, not a delving into “dark murk” as with the Kate situation.

4. The Vernon Township “radium dirt” story  [JCP? RVT?]

I’ve mentioned this topic (a 1986 set of anecdotes and analysis) a couple times before, the last time near the start of this late December entry. Very recently, in The New York Times (February 25, 2014, p. A20), there was a semi-story/semi-column headlined “In Plan to Dump Contaminated Soil, Classic New Jersey Politics Emerge”—about a recent situation near the Rahway River, toward central New Jersey. I don’t know anything more about this than what this article says, but my own 1986 story isn’t really meant to be filed under the conception of “classic New Jersey politics,” because (in part) the radium-soil plan in 1986 was unilaterally proposed by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (and actually, they were ready to start trucking waste) on a naïve assumption that local residents wouldn’t object. This matter didn’t involve multiple parties behind the dumping plan, variously on the political side and with a private contractor, the way the 2014 story seems to.

My 1986 story will be of historical interest, partly because the fear concerning radioactive substances that was involved then resonated with Cold War concerns (among resultant public rhetoric, there was reference to communism; and the Chernobyl disaster, which of course entailed radioactive contamination in the U.S.S.R., had happened just a few months before). The story does involve, among other parties, Victor Marotta, who was township mayor at the time, and he was at the start of his political career that would take him to election to a county freeholder position a year or two later.

He is currently township mayor again, and I am not seeking to make any comment one way or the other about a current issue regarding a township ordinance that was passed to increase his pay (under the mayor/council form of government here) from $30,000 to $70,000 annually, which is subject to a drive to put the matter into a referendum on the ballot in November. Relevant to my projected story, Marotta in 1986 did appear in the news as a leader in the face of the radium-soil proposal; and years later, he showed strong leadership in such township matters as a zoning issue concerning the microwave-stations firm MicroNet in 1991.

My 1986 story will look at how what may have been crucial to the reversal of the soil-dumping plan in Vernon Township wasn’t actions within the township so much as actions across the state border in Warwick, N.Y., where parties—members of the public, the municipal government, etc.—feared contamination of their aquifer. Thus the Warwick parties pursued court action, including a motion for an injunction (to stop the dumping plan) in state Supreme Court, located in Manhattan. I believe it was Warwick actions that really had the decisive legal effect, but I need to research this further.

(To make clear on terms: In New York State, what is the trial-level court and is equivalent to what is called “Superior Court” in New Jersey is called “Supreme Court.” In both states, there is an appellate level [within the state court system] immediately above these. Then, in New York State, there is no higher court level than appellate on the state level, but as needed, cases are appealed there to the federal court level; meanwhile, in New Jersey, there is the higher level of the state Supreme Court.)

I don’t expect my “radium soil” story to be ready until late this year.

5. The “Alan L.” mini-series  [RVT]

I feel this mini-series will happen, and I certainly have certain narrative ideas bubbling in my head with enthusiasm. (Following is the tentative mini-series title, seen in this introductory entry: “Memories of freshman year in college: Alan L., a presuming “social arbiter” with a voice like a mafioso’s.”) It seems to make sense to have this mini-series somehow fall under the banner of my “GWU Days” mini-series, which I did a post for last year (with this April 2013 entry).

But I am taking my time getting into this mini-series, and it may start once spring is “busting out all over.” By the way, this year is the 30^th anniversary of my college graduation, so I don’t know if that fact will somehow tie into—or somehow shape—this series or not.

6. 1970s films—and a look at the 1980s

What it seems should be fun—and in some sense usually is, for me at least—is my set of entries under the banner “Patchouli and B.O.: Entries reflecting on the 1970s.” And indeed, I have a clot of movie reviews in the works to present under this banner. One film in particular, from 1977, I viewed this winter (it took an unusual effort to get a copy through a library system), and I wrote up some substantive stuff on it—and it, to me, is one excellent measure of the 1970s, as it took its own unsparing look at the extent of self-indulgence that the young could get into in those days, and it also reflected the moral dismay that “older generations” could have to this.

Also, in some sense this film echoed the very real experience I had (as an isolated, alienated youth) of the later part of that decade: a sort of debauchery among peers that seemed to blossom around you, like the colored smoke in Apocalypse Now, but with your dismay at this (something along the lines of the sentiments of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) flowing out along with it, and yet with your not seeming to see any real resolution in sight.

The problem for me is that the 1977 film in question—which was a Paramount offering that got big press coverage at the time, and earned one of its actresses an award nomination—features some “blue” elements (meaning sexual, not “depression-related”), so it will take me some work to see exactly how I present my review, though I went at the lengthy initial draft with good morale and creativity.

Sidebar: The “theme key”—what is it? I also will post a “theme key” entry—a new sort of helping set of notes—that will provide some framework within which to navigate a discussion of this 1977 film (and, as it happens, one or two other films). In short, I want to provide some way for (younger) readers to piece through a story that is constructed with an elaborate complex of assumptions, some of which may be foreign or troubling; and I want to provide a way to dissect these without seeming to endorse any of the more unfriendly assumptions that are tangled up in the story.

For instance, in December I had wanted to do a review of the recent Silver Linings Playbook (2012), but I posted an entry on my other blog that serves as a sort of “theme key” for that film. I still am slow to finish the review on Silver Linings, because I feel yet another “theme key” is needed for it—which is on a matter that is different from what is concerning about the 1977 film just noted.

Of course, I have numerous other movie reviews in the works, most from 1970s films (generally meaning that some fun is ahead), that might make me look—in terms of busy-ness—like John Lennon composing a ton of songs in Rishikesh during The Beatles’ retreat there (to get concerted classes in Transcendental Meditation) in winter/spring 1968. You know, Dr. Winston O’Boogie himself (End note), letting his beard grow in a carefree way, and the living conditions seedy in the bungalows of the Maharishi’s ashram, monkeys hanging around for a handout and insects a little too big. (No, I didn’t recently grow a beard—or deal with monkeys.)

But in the midst of my overall sideline of “old movies” viewing—not that this is all I do all day—it occurred to me that a look back at 1980s culture might be worthwhile, too. This because it seems there is a 1980s nostalgia among American middle-class youths now—or, perhaps better to say, young audiences who were not alive or sophisticatedly conscious at the time are “taken with” 1980s premises and styles, as if the period was—I don’t know—“groovy” in its own way, containing a “je ne sais quoi worth emulating,” like the 1960s were for some and the 1970s were for others who became more adult-style aware later.

So, since I went to college in the 1980s (and have more-fun memories of the 1980s than of the 1970s), I could take a retrospective swing through ’80s culture. The Breakfast Club, anyone? A sketch of the Iran-contra affair? A music-time glance at Michael Jackson’s album Thriller? The possibilities bubble up like Smurfs through your air vents.

I’ve also toyed with a possible mini-series subhead for 1980s comments. How about: “Howard Jones’ hair: A revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture”? (I mean his 1985 hair.) [Update 3/27/14: This series heading has been changed to "Morning Becomes Reagan: A revisiting of 1980s pop (and political) culture."]

Note: Both my 1970s and 1980s film-review series will run concurrently.

End note.

“Dr. Winston O’Boogie” is one of the playful aliases Lennon put in the liner notes for his 1974 album Walls and Bridges.

OFAD*: Another slice of Spam in Bananarepublic Land: The latest in my corner of dealing with the ACA

* “Obamacare: Full Adult Diaper?”—my subhead for this very occasional series, described here, subsection 6.

The state, as multiple news stories attest, even drops a ball impacting Medicaid signup

Subsections below:

What I found in inquiring about my own application

Four phone calls a charm?

Recent news about another loss of an opportunity by the state

Addendum, regarding a column by Michael Reagan: “Trickle down” is back

[Edit 2/24/14. Edits 3/13/14. Edit 3/18/14.]
 

First, here is part of what I said in Part 1, to orient you:

I don’t really want to go into a lot of depth about my small part in the signup under the Affordable Care Act. I did go on the federal “marketplace” Web site in December (I’m in New Jersey, and we don’t have a state site for this). I filled out the application in what seemed for me the right way. And I haven’t heard or gotten anything since: no e-mail, and no letter or application package in the mail. (There was a perfunctory pdf of a letter that came at the end of the process of applying on the federal site. It was slightly erratic, stuffed with various info, and overall not too bad.)

What I found in inquiring about my own application

Now, what I found out within recent weeks is, let’s say, consistent with my personal assessment that the Affordable Care Act is the worst piece of federal legislation, which has the effect on me (and everyone else) that it does, that I have seen in my lifetime. (And I say this as a Democrat who has voted for a Democrat for president in every election since 1984, and did not vote for Reagan in 1980 but voted for Anderson, and if I could have done it over, would have voted for Carter.)

Another “bottom line” is more constructive: In absence of my having health insurance through this program (assuming my Medicaid coverage doesn’t come through), with my family’s history of heart disease, at least I can count on the following measures, which are also pretty cheap: eating a salad every day, and taking regular aspirin every day. They also say laughter is the best medicine, and I can get causes for this; but the ACA is not among them.

Anyway, I first, on February 14, went on the federal marketplace Web site and signed in to my account. It said my application is “complete” and gave an ID number. But when I clicked on a link that said “Find my application,” I got a message saying “File not found,” or such.

Next idea was to talk to someone at the 800 number given, by the letter pdf that had accompanied the initial filing of my application in December, and try to talk to someone there. This is the number for the office for NJ [New Jersey] FamilyCare, which administers Medicaid applications in the state.

Four phone calls a charm?

On February 18, I phoned no fewer than four times in a row. In their system, you press different options offered on the phone, which are not numbered consecutively and, well…

On the first call, I got to a message giving some general information regarding NJ FamilyCare, and then you get options, including a #2 (I won’t list all buttons I pressed, in this overall account), which when I pressed it led to an impersonal phone-company type message, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed,” and then a sound as if I was disconnected, or close to it.

Second call: I got to an option (another #2) which would allow me “to apply or…” and when I pressed this, and heard options, one of which was “to talk to….” I pressed this option, and got “…Your call cannot be completed as dialed.”

Third call: I pressed another series of options, and got to where I actually was told (mechanically) a policy number for my own “household.” I wrote this number down; I even got a phone-option chance to hear the number again. Then when I tried to go to another option giving info on application status, I heard a message, “This option is currently not available to you.”

Fourth call: I tried to press options including for what I could find out about an “ongoing application,” and I got an option where I could enter my policy number and my ZIP code for verification. Then I heard something I heard on the previous call: “This option is currently not available to you.”

So—I found there is a policy number for my case. But I can’t get any information on it. (And certainly I’ve never received anything in the mail, even an invitation to appear in a county social services office to further proceed through the application in a more formal capacity, showing proof of x, y, z, etc., as some of the Medicaid-related boilerplate I’ve seen seems to suggest the state office needs to see.)

On February 18, I gave up, confident—in having done what I could at this point. I also knew, as I’d considered for months, that I could always pay the $95 penalty on my 1040 form that is filed in 2015 (for tax year 2014), regarding whether I’d gotten insurance per the ACA. [Update 3/13/14: Yesterday, I tried the NJ FamilyCare number again; after trying the options (apparently from the same broader array of options) that were most suitable to my situation, I got the same result as with the "Fourth call" description given above. I also found that the general info stated at the beginning of the call included the note that, due to the tremendous volume of calls, a caller may end up encountering a message that said that the call was disconnected, or such. Lastly, today The Star-Ledger, the main newspaper of New Jersey, had an article on the hideously huge backlog of ACA cases--and consumers' lacking something in hand--on both the level of private insurance and the level of the Medicaid expansion (the NJ FamilyCare route).]   

One test of good government is the confidence it gives you.

Recent news about another loss of an opportunity by the state

Strangely to me, the state newspaper, and even local newspapers, have not been covering the deficient Medicaid-application situation under the ACA. It’s not for lack of people this is relevant to; a recent report there were tens of thousands (was it?) who signed up for ACA Medicaid-extension coverage in the state. But where, when, were all these people processed? Did they get by now a Medicaid card showing they were in the system? Or were the statistics merely reported by some federal-level or general state-level entity who reported only the number of people whose info from the federal ACA Web site were transferred over to the state, without the applications fully being processed yet? On the evidence of what I’ve found through numerous phone calls, on January 6 and February 18 (especially the latter), I find it hard to believe the state even processed hundreds of people, never mind thousands, if their phone system, which can’t even give me the status of my policy, is so rinky-dink.

Recent news seems to support my skeptical view.

On Friday, February 21, it was reported in the state’s Star-Ledger (pg. 22) that the state was at risk of losing a grant of federal money that was received in 2012 tied to the original issue of whether the state would set up its own marketplace Web site (which it, of course, did not do). The $7.6 million grant was subject to the state’s submitting a subsequent plan for how it would use the money, in absence of erecting a state marketplace site.

As it happened, the state submitted a proposal, but this was not accepted by the federal department of Health and Human Services. State Insurance Commissioner Ken Kobylowski, according to the Star-Ledger article, had “asked to use the majority of funds, or $4.86 million, to staff the NJ FamilyCare hotline for state Medicaid recipients that he said has faced an ‘unprecedented rate’ of calls about the health care law.”

That sounds like calls from such people as myself. Except multiplied thousands of times.

So I wasn’t just finding a fluke tied uniquely to me, in having a totally deficient “phone experience” on February 18.

The state did not submit another plan, after HHS had rejected its plan with the FamilyCare component. The February 21 news article suggested the deadline was approaching and the Christie Administration was on the brink of missing it.

And it missed it.

Headline in the next issue of The Star-Ledger (February 22, pg. 3): “State loses federal health care grant worth $7.6 million.”

Lead paragraph: “New Jersey has been stripped of a $7.6 million grant toward a health insurance overhaul after Gov. Chris Christie’s administration failed to submit a plan for using the money to steer uninsured residents to health plans, federal health officials said in a statement yesterday.”

I think, as far as I read the situation that I have approached “journalistically” from direct and indirect angles, the largest problem represented by loss of the $7.6 million is proper administration of the Medicaid component of the ACA in this state. And this implies not merely state employees’ answering frivolous informational questions but properly processing the applications.

Now NJ FamilyCare also helps the poor (but not too poor) to sign up for private insurance, if they can afford it (though, under the ACA, depending on income level, there would be federal subsidies). There already was a working Web site (under NJ FamilyCare) for this in the state last fall, which I encountered, and which I found decidedly didn’t square with my needs as someone who needed to sign up for Medicaid under the ACA’s Medicaid-expansion component.

Clarification on a point, from the get-go: Someone writing in the letters to the editor section of the February 23 New Jersey Sunday Herald relates a personal story of difficulty she found in signing up for individual insurance through what was apparently the NJ FamilyCare program. She speaks about starting to enroll in private insurance, and found subsequently, among other disappointing features, that she was disallowed under her new plan to see her doctor in what had been her old network or arrangement. This is a typical consequence of Obamacare (not that individuals don’t have a right to complain about it). And her story is worth presenting in general, because with a federal program like this, as much as sundry public figures (media professionals or not) promote it, the major flaws in the ACA—so important to heed (to judge the soundness of the legislation)—are revealed in the stories of disserved individuals. Anyway, I think this woman is mistaken on one point: she talks about her private plan being a version of Medicaid, apparently due to federal subsidies involved. Whether she meant this metaphorically or not, I don’t know. Important: PRIVATE PLANS THAT ARE PARTLY SUBSIDIZED ARE NOT FORMS OF MEDICAID. Medicaid is very much an all-government-subsidized plan, and a bare-bones one at that, for the poorest citizens. (This also limits quite a bit how useful it is, in getting acceptance from health-care professionals for care.) IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS DISTINCTION SO THAT WHEN WE SAY THE NJ FamilyCare SERVICE IS FUMBLING WITH SIGNUPS FOR MEDICAID, IT IS FUMBLING WITH THIS PROGRAM AND NOT WITH THE PRIVATE PLANS, which NJ FamilyCare was apparently working smoothly with last fall, unlike with the Medicaid-expansion signups.

I’m sure a lot of poor who need Medicaid and could have benefited from the ACA-directed signup for it will find this situation a kick in the ass. Maybe we all will find our applications processed, in dribs and drabs, by the summer. (And this state’s loss of filing an application properly for the $7.6 million grant pales compared to the many-multi-million dollar opportunity lost by the state, of 2011 [I think], in failing to properly fill out an application for qualifying for federal educational aid, or whatever it was.)

Myself—and I will outline my thoughts on this a little further in the subsection below, on Michael Reagan—I am not terribly concerned about signing up for Medicaid this year. I have thought on this numerous times, and as someone who has paid for his own health care the vast majority of the time as an adult, and rarely having insurance (from an employer or not), I will not feel heartbroken over not getting Medicaid this year. And if in fact my application is not processed in 2014, I will look into the matter again with the next open-enrollment period in the fall. Further, the penalty for not signing up this year is only $95 (more thoughts on which are offered below).

The irony of all this is, with Medicaid, you’re supposed to requalify every year anyway, though I’m sure subsequent reviews for this aren’t as complex as the initial signup and requisite review of your case.

But if I find the NJ FamilyCare system’s ability to accept Medicaid applications to be a slovenly mess next fall, then I will really feel this ACA thing is a total disaster, not just at federal hands, but at the Christie Administration’s hands, too. (This is assuming I try to sign up again in New Jersey.)

I hope to say no more about this ACA situation on this blog, but we’ll see what arises, whether in my life or in the newspaper.

Addendum, regarding a column by Michael Reagan: “Trickle down” is back

I read in a local paper (not The Star-Ledger), which has a generally conservative editorial slant, a subscription-service editorial column by Michael Reagan, on the ACA. He proposes the gripe, becoming common among conservatives now, that the ACA is lamentable because it is allowing people “not to work” and meanwhile to collect health insurance as subsidized by the federal government. Allow me to slip on my Democratic hat for a moment.

I try not to get into a lot of stock-political discussion, since life is more complex than a lot of hack-political phrases tend to imply, and certainly a lot of Democratic lines of discussion are tailored to the union mentality. But it’s not quite amusing, in fact it’s annoying (at best), to see this son of a former president whom I never cared for spewing out a bit of conservative dogma. Yes, the ACA is severely flawed; yes, I would be among the first to make strong criticisms about it, as I suggest above and will do again below. But idiot conservative dogma in this time of the many problems posed by the ACA is NOT what is needed.

I remember about 20 or more years ago, one of the stock conservative/Republican economic lines was “free market”—when we were still in competition with the Soviets, and a position against command-economy economics seemed “as right as rain,” and hence so vague a concept as “free market” could seem like a can’t-miss battle standard for the conservatives. Nowadays, that simplistic battle standard as been replaced by something even more uncritical, simple pro-business dogma—as if business, any kind of business, can do no wrong, and is almost always a preferable alternative to government patriarchalism, or whatever you want to call conservatives’ ultimate bugbear.

The idea that the ACA promotes “not getting a job” because “now it allows you to get insurance without one” (not a direct quote, but summing the apparent assumptions) seems, to me, to carry some racist baggage also. As if all those going on government-aided ACA coverage are almost exactly the same who hopped on the food-stamps and welfare bandwagons about 40 years ago. But leave that line of criticism aside.

The fact is that businesses have found ways not to give health insurance coverage to employees for DECADES. In fact, this is one main reason for the ACA. If people didn’t have health insurance, and couldn’t get it from employers, how else were they going to get it, if suddenly the overriding Democratic policy-notion was that “all must be covered, to bring down health-care costs” (to me an assumption begging for criticism in its own right)?

Since 1978, I have worked for dozens of employers, and I could probably count on one hand the number that offered any sort of health insurance that you didn’t have to partially pay for, and several instances of this were temporary insurance (because the job was temporary, including a VISTA stint). In the print-media industry, it is a notorious fact that employers will find every way they can not to give you a raft of benefits, health insurance chief among them. You say, “But this was pre-ACA; the ACA requires employers…” But as we know, employers are now finding ways to make some employees part-time (< 30 hours/week) in order to elude giving all their employees insurance.

The way employers have sought not to provide health insurance, because of its costs, has been such an engrained fact of life in the U.S., for so long, that I would think a Democrat would have to be mighty stupid indeed to think that ALL employers must now give ALL employees a full health-insurance policy, just as it would be a STUPID Republican who would feel almost the same thing in their criticisms of the ACA like Michael Reagan’s.

Reagan, like his father, seems to believe in “trickle-down” economics, where if you kiss up to the business world in every way (as a rank-and-file worker or business leader), eventually wealth will trickle down into your pocket. This was a philosophy I couldn’t agree with in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was in office (not on any vote of mine), and gets toted out now, as if Mini Me had nothing more intelligent to offer than a stale version of the same plain-Jane bread his father peddled 30 years before—making him as dynamic and equal to current challenges as a half-senile fool reeking of old-fart BO and pain-relief ointment.

Sidebar: The “privilege”/hard work issue. Reagan points out a number of times that his being a son of a Hollywood actor family didn’t earn him special privileges in his family (he even refers tongue-in-cheek to the “Beverly Hills welfare” that his mother didn’t believe in). His family enforced his need to learn to work toward where he wanted to go, etc. OK, laudable. But didn’t his father’s famous name help him in some ways, at one point or another, along the winding road of his life? Might it not have helped him when he got a radio show that he notes he traveled 262 miles at a time (round-trip) to perform? Michael Reagan might say: “Well, my father’s good name meant less than you think. He was a yutz of a B-movie actor (I mean, Bedtime for Bonzo??), and was joked about as presidential material in about 1970 on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. He was one of the more overrated presidents in our history, and the credit he gets for the fall of East Bloc communism is vastly overblown. His ‘catsup is a vegetable’ social-policy ideas and foreign-policy gaffes (“Russia’s been outlawed; we begin bombing in five minutes”) are legend. Iran-contra was a true stain on his presidency. Do you think all that provided a red carpet for me all along the way?” If this is what you argue, OK, Mr. Reagan, I see your point. Quite well. But my own winding road of a life didn’t even have a second-rate president in my family tree to help me out.

Now let’s see in a specific case how much the “pro-business” philosophy squares with the realities of our current world and the ACA. I use my own droll example. As Mr. Reagan might approve, I am “employed”—I am self-employed. But based on my income for the past three years, I qualify for Medicaid this year under the ACA. Do I relish this? Not a bit. In fact, if some doctors I saw didn’t take Medicaid, that’s OK, because I’ve been paying out of pocket for my own health-care costs for many years anyway.

But a glitch has arisen on the state level with my ACA application. Though I have a policy number, according to the NJ FamilyCare phone line, I still don’t know if I have Medicaid coverage. So I may need to pay the $95 penalty at tax time next year. This I’ve been willing to do for many months, in considering my options under the ACA situation.

I would consider the $95 penalty to be a “cost of doing business,” so to speak. [Update 2/24/14: See update note two paragraphs below.]

Now let’s say I retry to get Medicaid (or even private insurance, but probably subsidized to some extent, because of likely income level) in the open-enrollment period starting next fall. Say it doesn’t work out (because of such wonders of the federal Web site, or the state FamilyCare service, as I encountered in recent months).

Then I would have to pay a $695 penalty (I think it is) in early 2016, for the 2015 tax year, for failure to sign up for insurance. [Update 2/24/14: $695 is the figure that has been in the press for the penalty payable in 2016, but what has also been noted regarding both the $95/2015 penalty and the $695 is that, depending on level of reported income, the amount you owe could either be those figures or 2.5% of income (whether adjusted gross or taxable income, I don't know). Whether the idea is "the smaller of $695 or 2.5%"--which would be helpful to lower-income people--I don't know. It would make sense if it was this. Update 3/18/14: It appears that the logical pattern of the penalty is the other way than I had thought: for the first year, the minimum penalty is $95 per individual, and above a certain income level, the penalty is a percentage of adjusted gross income (resulting in a higher dollar amount). An article in the March 16 Star-Ledger of New Jersey (p. 1) has a headline giving the nature of the concern: "Not buying a health plan could cost you[:] Fines are steeper than many realize." I'm surprised that, regarding the ACA, with all the media cheerleading, coverage of Web site gaffes, and so on that have been done (in many newspapers) in the past five or so months, a definitive, clear, and thorough focus on the penalty aspect, just to inform the focus on practical realities it faces, hasn't been done until very recently, just a few weeks before the open enrollment period ends.]

Now this is a lot harder to swallow for me (as it would in some sense for most other taxpayers). For me, if my income—as a self-employed person—stayed about the same as the past few years, I would actually have to set aside MORE money (as estimated tax payments) to cover the ACA fee than I would have to for regular self-employment tax.

How’s that for someone “sucking up to” the culture of “doing business”?

If I was to say, “As an employer I can’t afford to insure my employee,” I would be close to accurate, or exactly so. The cost—and, in the penalty, this doesn’t even get me insurance—would be more than self-employment tax would be. That would put me in some kind of league with the many big employers who have tried to find ways not to offer fully-paid insurance—like my own college, GWU, with me in 1984, which was one year of Reaganella’s presidency. (By the way, I have filed tax returns every year since 1979. And I repaid about eight months of Social Security survivors’ benefits in 1984 because of a Reagan policy demanding a scale-back of such benefits.)

How about them apples, Mr. Son of Trickle-Down?

Winter critter stories

Let me try to make this simple. After all, we’re dealing with fur-covered creatures, not egos in a frenetic workplace.

In a winter like this, you may wonder, “Where have all the critters gone?”—and it’s optional to say this with a melody from the old folk song with similar lyrics. Where I am, in northern New Jersey (End note), many animals have “disappeared.” With all the snow, even the squirrels are scarce, and in this area, they usually appear throughout the winter. I do hear the simple songs of the cardinal (the bird), which is a typical winter phenomenon here. And in recent weeks, some other birds have turned up, these specific ones out of season, like robins a couple weeks ago, apparently because their food elsewhere (where they “winter”) is scarce.

And now for a few oddities:

A winter rabbit

We’ve have wild rabbits in evidence off and on through the years. Some years, you hardly see them; others, you see them a surprising lot. But you typically see them in the warm weather (spring maybe, and definitely summer and much of the fall), and they can be spotted, out eating either in the very early morning (before the sun is up) or the late afternoon, in lawns, hunched down, mouth a-munching, maybe eye catching sight of you apprehensively. You often suddenly come upon them while you’re least expecting them, and you become alerted to them when they startle at you, as you lumber along like an oblivious lummox.

But none here are a wintering-over variety, like a snowshoe hare.

So this winter, it was odd to see a rabbit—a rather big, or adult-sized, one—show up first in very late December, out near (or on) lawns eating. We’d already had (in later December) bitter cold and snow. The lawns had become yellow, dead-looking. And yet this rabbit turned up, eating something. (Could it get any nutrition from yellow lawn grass?)

Then we had an extreme cold snap in early January. Then the rabbit showed up again, around January 7, somehow finding something to eat amid the yellow lawn, and in areas where weeds usually are and that look dead and unable to sustain life now. (The last I saw it might have been mid-January or the third week of that month.)

Why wasn’t this fellow hibernating?

Since (in later January and in the first half of February) we’ve had weeks of repeated snows and polar-vortex cold—lately there is about two-and-a-half to three feet of snow on the ground, from several falls—this rabbit has not reappeared. Maybe he finally decided to stay in his hibernating hole (or was forced to by snow cover).

Hard to figure out.

Rodents crawl out from under the snow pack

One little item of conversation (a sort of general-topic kind) that I’ve had with my mother, who is an avid observer of wildlife herself, is how might it be that local chipmunks—generally, ground squirrels who live in holes in the ground—survive the winter, especially with a lot of snow on the ground. It does seem reasonable to suppose that some die. For instance, after Superstorm Sandy, it seemed we had distinctly fewer chipmunks in the yard in the spring of 2013 than were still running around in fall 2012. So it was reasonable to hypothesize that some had drowned underground with the phenomenally heavy rain we had with the storm. But what about with a normal winter?

One would assume, first, that when they hibernate—they do take food into their burrows, it seems, but one wouldn’t expect they would eat normally underground for three or four months—their metabolism slows down quite a lot, and they’re in a state of almost coma-like “sleep.” But don’t they still need air? If the ground, including their holes, is covered with a layer of snow, especially if the snow gets denser and surface-hardened by being on the ground a long time (and subjected to sun-induced thawing-then-refreezing), don’t they start to lack air? Can they suffocate?

Well, this was the “academic” question. Then, just yesterday—and this surprises me as much as it may you—I found one possible “semi-answer” to that question.

After I’d been working—as so many of us have—to remove the huge dump of snow from a driveway at a house across from mine, for which I serve as a sort of “night watchman”/concierge when its owners are away, there resulted (from the shoveling) a large bank of snow on either side of the driveway. Maybe two or more feet tall on either side.

Well, in the afternoon yesterday, following the end of snow’s falling and after the temperature has risen above freezing level, I found something odd. Down a flat stretch of snow not yet shoveled from the driveway just mentioned, I saw sets of tracks, as from a rodent (actually, at least two). They were spaced as to suggest a quick scurrying.

Later I found that the tracks seemed to go to, or come from, a hole (about an inch wide or a bit more) in the bank on one side of the driveway. I peered in. The hole threaded its way down into the snow, going beyond how far I could see in. Did a creature crawl its way out of the snow, say, from the ground? Or had it crawled in and down? A whole lot of scuff marks lay in the snow just down the sloped bank from the hole. It made more sense to suppose a creature (or two or more) had tunneled up through the snow, from the ground, and out. This because, why would something that was already outside the snow come along and think, “This looks like a good place to tunnel down,” and dig into the snow and go down? Something that small couldn’t know where the ground was, or in what condition it was, beneath all the snow.

So, safe hypothesis #1: One or more rodents had tunneled up through a lot of snow from the ground, apparently in a prodigious effort to get out.

Now, what kind of rodent? A mouse? The size of the tracks—including toe marks—seemed a little big for the type of field/house mice I can see around here. And they definitely were smaller than a normal squirrel’s. And why would mice (which are about half the size of chipmunks) have been in the ground and tunnel up (through approaching two feet of snow) with the energy required? It just seemed, size-wise and considering the energy needed, that it had been chipmunks that had done this.

The tracks, I found, went to the bases of two “columns” (decorative woodwork) at the corners of the carport that is a feature of this house. It was as if the rodents sought out the columns and crept underneath them. (There may well be spaces up inside the wood structure in which they could “burrow.”)

Which I believe I’ve seen furtive chipmunks do, not dealing with the challenge of snow, in the warm weather.

So, fairly-safe hypothesis #2: Chipmunks near the area of that hole had reached a point where they had to come up from their underground burrows, and had drilled through the snow to do it, and ran to the next best place they could find shelter.

Now, why could this have been? Were they starting to suffocate with the snow cover? Or, somehow, had they detected that it had gotten warmer outside, and they were triggered into thinking spring had arrived? (By the way, within a mass of snow, it is always 32 degrees, from what I’ve heard.)

It was hard to say. Certainly, as to the temperature trigger, the jury is out. As a matter of fact, we’ve had unseasonably warm days before this season, and chipmunks didn’t seem to come out then.

As for the suffocation hypothesis: If the critters who made the hole and marks were starting to feel there was a danger to them with all the snow above their holes, whether or not breathing was an issue, their will to escape certainly would have made sense. But imagine the “heroic” efforts: Say, you live underground (in a bomb shelter), and suddenly you’re aware you’re covered up above by something that could eventually snuff you out, like a newly arrived snow avalanche. You start digging through the snow by hand. Up through the snow, not knowing how deep it is. You get out and run along the ground to shelter.

The stuff of an adventure movie, perhaps? (Starring the likes of Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson?) But for a creature that might have been suffocating, to make that physical effort would be a marvel. You need oxygen to exert a lot of physical effort. And of course, chipmunks don’t have the conscious thought of humans; they had their instincts to “guide” them. And the blind faith of simple animals. I guess, in their shoes, if you’re desperate, you’ll try what you can with what oxygen you have, and if you get out, hooray. If not, at least you tried.

Too bad the U.S. Congress doesn’t make the same heroic effort.

##

End note

As for my location: look on a map: look at the top border that New Jersey has with New York State, follow it about two-thirds of the way from the right, and right next to New York: that’s where I am, and figure out the latitude on your own. Also, I live on a mountain at an altitude of about 1,150 feet.

A quickie Beatles note: If you feel you came to them “late,” I did too

[Edit 2/10/14.]

I have a draft, and plans, for more extensive talk on The Beatles, but hopefully it won’t take me so long that we will all have forgotten this February celebration by the time some of my muck is out. (And maybe I’ll spare you and not post it at all.)

But, to slobber out a quick note: First, are the Gen-Xers, the Millennials, or whatever other media-defined groups younger than the original Boomers thinking that “This is not my era, not my group,” or whatever? Well, even for me, The Beatles were “before my time”—in the following way:

In 1976, shortly before I became 15, I was starting to buy my first Beatles albums (which were my first of any rock group’s albums). The first was Sgt. Pepper, in October. In about early December, with precious allowance money, I bought three or four more at once (including the “White Album” and Magical Mystery Tour, keeping them hidden at home at first, as if they were contraband). I bought then at a then-long-ensconced record store in the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne Township, N.J. The long-haired, young-woman cashier I checked out with said, “You’re catching up on lost time with all these Beatles albums.” As if they were so “seven years ago.” (Yes, I remember all this because—well, The Beatles had a way of being historically significant, no?)

(I still have almost all of the Beatles albums I bought then.)

Well, I became, and still am, a solid Beatles fan, though I look at their stuff and history more from the old eyes of a 52-year-old. For instance, today, sometimes, they do seem from another era (especially the touring-period stuff, from ’63 and ‘’64, let’s say), and yet their appeal still takes root in younger generations—even if in the sense of  a given kid’s “beginning” rock, something to cut your teeth on, before you move on to “more mature tastes” in Led Zeppelin, Nine Inch Nails, whoever.

The Beatles seem to stick with us almost like one of Paul McCartney’s many hook-laden post-Beatles songs, where we say, “Gee, that song is really kind of stupid, but I can’t get it out of my head. (I think about it as I get through housework.)” But we know so many of their songs were not merely goofy confections.

And as for the smarter principal of The Beatles: We also read through The Beatles’ big coffee-table-sized autobio book, published in 2000, and read other stuff we can find, and we consider it interesting how John Lennon—even if he sounded at times (juxtaposed with the 50-something other Beatles) young and a “searching lost-and-wounded fellow”—seemed so much smarter than the others: e.g., seeing through the crazy-bullshit side of the pop-music biz at times. And we might think if he had had a better upbringing and family life, and had a better career start, maybe he could have been a more conservatively appealing cultural pillar of Great Britain. (You might ask, Like who? Mick Jagger?)

As with so much else where the American Baby Boomers helped define a cultural moment, so many of the “I was there” and “Did you meet them?” interviews on TV lately focus on Boomers, now a little long in the tooth (perhaps with personal histories of surgeries and aches not envisioned in their days of youth), talking about having seen the group at Shea in 1966, or in New York in 1964.

Again, coming at the tail end of the Boomer generation (when defined as born from 1946 to 1964), I have only the “table scraps” of what I can count as memories. For instance, I do remember the 1968 songs “Lady Madonna” and “Hey Jude” being on the radio as current hits. And I do remember having a sense that “Hey Jude” was a hit for an unusually long period of time (which was objectively true). I think I remember something (in 1969) from the album Abbey Road being on the radio—maybe “Here Comes the Sun.”

Beatles’ growth and career tenure coincided with technical changes for pop culture

What is a little strange, given the place in music history that the album has been placed in, I remember not hearing anything from Sgt. Pepper on the radio in 1967. Now that was a year I was aware of radio stuff; when in 1967 I was with my father and the rest of my family when he was refurbishing my mother’s family’s old house in Wood-Ridge, N.J., and he had the radio on as he often did, there were plenty of songs I heard and still remember from that time, like “King of the Road” and “Georgy Girl” [sp?], and maybe some Sinatra. But no Beatles stuff. The first time I remember hearing Sgt. Pepper stuff is when I used to see the film Yellow Submarine (1968) on the TV, as a yearly ritual, probably starting in about 1971.

Why did I hear no Pepper songs in 1967? This reflects how different the times were then. Pepper had no singles of the normal type released for the radio, certainly in the U.S. There are stories Great Britain’s BBC banned playing some of the album tracks, but in Britain, it may have been more common to play album cuts (not singles) on mainstream radio. Not in the U.S.

The Beatles rode a wave of not only their phenomenal popularity—something that was really a cultural “tsunami” that tends to be overlooked in books like Bob Spitz’s bio The Beatles from 2005, where young readers might be befuddled when reading the rather-scholarly treatment but not quite seeing there—only getting “residual evidence” of it—the almost cultural earthquake of how the group became immensely popular overnight, and never really lost that status for about six years while they were still together. For much of the same period, albums were usually released in mono—stereo was a sort of novelty; this was until the late 1960s. [correction 2/10/14] The "White Album" was the last full album of theirs mastered for both mono and stereo; Abbey Road was mastered only for stereo, I believe, reflecting a marketplace sea change.

Meanwhile, as is probably well known, musical groups released both albums and singles, and the singles market was really where you could count on the big attention. The business angle in the 1960s wasn’t to support an album with a tour; an album got a marketing “boost” from accompanying singles being released. But Sgt. Pepper was unusual in that there were no official singles released from it by Capitol in the U.S. (or by EMI in Britain).

Further, AM radio—like WABC in New York, the monster station at the time (and into the 1970s, at 50,000 watts or whatever it was)—was how rock groups were primarily “distributed” on air. The station format of “album-oriented rock” only got started in the 1970s, and early on, it was pretty much a province for really “artistically interested” fans, those who probed into the intricate offerings of the art-rock groups like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer; Pink Floyd; Yes; and so on. For pop-music artists who really wanted a grip on good sales (whether to support an album or just to be mainstream stars), the channel for doing this was singles, played on the likes of WABC, well into the 1970s.

Bottom line, no Sgt. Pepper “singles” ended up on WABC, so I never heard that album then. (And for what reason I don’t know, but I never heard, in 1967, the “unofficial singles” from that album, the great “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” which were really independently released songs that came out months before the album. Maybe I didn’t hear them because I wasn’t in a situation where the radio would be on when they were out, in early ’67.)

Another technical change is that color TV really only got instituted during 1967 or so, as today’s fans of the likes of Gilligan’s Island may know. Today, young people might be shocked that TV could only have shown things in black-and-white, but that was the fact then. In Britain, The Beatles got screwed by this situation a bit: their self-made film Magical Mystery Tour, shown in Britain on “Boxing Day” (December 26) at first, was shown on the BBC channel that was in B&W, and partly as a result of the film not being well served by B&W, it was disliked. It was later shown on the color BBC channel, but the initial bad impression when it was in B&W is what sealed the fate of the film’s reputation at the time.

##

So, did I meet any Beatles? Did I see them at Shea? Did I see them on Sullivan? No, no, and no. I came to them “after they were the current thing,” like perhaps most of their fans of today did (in their own ways).

(I did see John’s son Julian perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in 1984, but that’s for another discussion.)

Running with the bulls: A look at working in New York City for a New Jersey placement firm, Part 1 of 3

My five-month stint at AM Medica in 2005 both yields a story of business craziness and is very atypical of medical-promotion anecdotes  [JCP]*

[*An expanded, or reconfigured, version of this entry could be included in the print “Jersey Combo Plate” package. Edits 2/10/14. Edits 2/19/14. Edits 2/20/14.]

Subsections below (for Part 1):

Starting to look at what AM Medica means

Coincidental resonance with some current events

What is a “placement agency” and what kind of “freelancer” was I at AM Medica?

Opening the door to AM Medica—from a more practical and subjective standpoint

The company’s main line of products at the time, and the specific account I was on

My immediate—and none too pleasing—boss (a start)

What follows:

Part 2:

My immediate—and none too pleasing—boss (full subsection)

One of my “secretarial” tasks—for me, more offhand than loved

The company structure—from my empirical viewpoint

The anecdote about a psych publisher

The strange transience of workers—unlike what you ever saw in Jersey

Part 3 (inclusion of subsections, and titles, updated):

This work stint consumed my entire weekdays, while it seemed to help my placement agency, GLG
In the teeth of the AM gig, brutally long days
In the teeth of the AM gig, a spur to incidental, young-years-type creative efforts 

Lunches with my sister and other mealtime novelties

The burden of this job was reflected, among other ways, in peculiar financial details

The arguable sine qua non of leaving: my working on "Ref Man"
Blessed relief

Just to make clear: when I said at the end of the Jason Aronson story (look at the end of this entry) that the “Dollars & sense” series was ended for now, I did not mean that the other series would be ended, such as the occasional “Running with the bulls” (on the latter theme, check out subsections 3 and 4 from this introductory entry). As was first planned, “Running with the bulls” was meant to be both separate from “Dollars & sense” and possibly able (in a specific entry) to overlap with it (that is, specific entries that fall under both banners). And I would be disappointed not to do at least one “Running with the bulls” entry.

But my priorities for this blog have been changing a bit, and anyway, I wanted my sets of entries that I outlined in the introductory entries here and here to be adaptable to different purposes—such as my having expanded versions, or additional stories, that end up in the “Jersey Combo Plate” collection. And I didn’t want to have one of the new series end up a long set stretched out over many weeks, like my Marvin Center series of last year, of which only a few entries have turned out to be really popular (to judge by links I see tallied).

From a more accessible viewpoint: The current couple of entries on AM Medica don’t really square with my original idea of “Running with the bulls…,” nor are they largely a story on New Jersey–firm business practices and manners. But they do involve a lot of running, and that in tough circumstances. (I also have, in reserve, a “Running with the bulls” story that solidly fits within the thematic framework, about a New Jersey firm, but if this is published in any way, it will be through the print “Jersey Combo Plate” avenue.)

E-Z takeaway: (1) A placement agency put me in a temp job in New York City, ostensibly as an editor, with a horribly long commute. (My first check from the placement agency, as it happened [and not that the agency was devious with this], came after I was at the job three weeks, having accumulated $200 in bus costs for that time, which I had some trouble absorbing before pay from this job would cover such costs.)

(2) The client company was flightily managed (by my immediate supervisor, anyway), including an avoidable, manager-induced lapse in its securing copyright permission for an item I did “admin”-type work for, to use as a handout in a conference.

(3) This anecdote illustrates in stark terms how the business of medical promotions is primarily oriented around billing the Big Pharma client, not ensuring quality of media product, especially at an editor’s hands.

(4) This temp job did not pay me enough for the extra NYC-related costs, and my boss handled me like a “girl Friday” much of the time, hence my triggering my “tenure’s” being ended.

Starting to look at what AM Medica means

When I talk here about the firm AM Medica, or Access Medica (as it was alternatively called)—I want to serve some other purposes. (Originally I wasn’t going to do much online research online into where it stands now, but I did, and it provides some interesting additional foundation for my analysis here. I’ll look at what I found below.)

For instance, the AM Medica story is a sort of crossroads in a number of ways:

* AM Medica symbolized, to an extent (and in the larger scheme of my anecdotes), the start of the breakdown of the placement agency GLG. My placement at AM Medica in March 2005 was, in a sense, a sign that the placement agency The Guy Louise Group was in financial trouble, which would become more evident in late 2005, and would reach “the point of no return” by about late 2006. GLG presumably wanted to haul in money from a source that probably seemed eminently promising: Manhattan firms. And I got to be the guinea pig that carried this “experiment” for them, for five busy months in the middle of 2005. (Only one other GLG-employed editor was put in a position similar to mine at AM Medica, and he lasted only about two weeks. Whether GLG placed other editors at other firms in NYC, I don’t know; I tend to doubt it.) Hence, the AM Medica story is a sort of preface to my GLG series.

* My work at this place came in a pretty successful year for me, a year that now seems of a “past, productive, unruffled era.” The year 2005 was a sort of “high-water-mark” year for me in retrospect. It was when my working for medical-promotion firms as aided by GLG still was effective and made sense—at least in terms of money, and following basic labor law or its spirit—as you would expect as a rank-and-file worker. (But of course 2006 was when the GLG business model, and related practices of its clients, started to come apart at the seams.) In my personal life, I was having one of my best years setting up educational lectures in Sussex County for NAMI Sussex. I was between working on book manuscripts with an agent and starting to write independently of that agent. It was a few years before the Great Recession. In a way, it seems like a wonderfully halcyon time for what creative and professional activities I was in.

* AM Medica was a sui generis spectacle compared to other medical-promo places. (Also, some comments below on where it stands—or doesn’t—today.) The AM Medica job was not only a harbinger of sorts for the breakdown of GLG, but it was in a way the most freakish medical-promotions job I had. I mean, it wasn’t simply a matter of sleaze and rude manners such as you can readily see in New Jersey (in fact, rude manners, as far as I was concerned, were basically limited to one person at AM Medica). It was crazy in the way that lesser-stature media places might seem to be in Manhattan, on the broader nature of which I have only scattered and often second-hand information. And not simply providing a story today of resentment or the like, AM Medica provides a kind of humor in telling of what a crazy work gig it was. The details will make this clear. (Interestingly, one feature missing from AM Medica—which I’ve also found lovably absent from what few other NYC gigs I’ve had—is the mentality of a coworker questioning your very right to be there—i.e., the extreme, “undermine-thy-cubicle-neighbor” mentality you so often get in New Jersey.)

I hasten to point out that this mini-series is not to suggest that, because of unprofessional or haphazard practices at AM Medica, the firm posed any risk to the public in a health-care respect. The particular product account I mainly worked on there was aimed at doctors working in a fairly settled area of health care, serious pain management (in many cases meaning chronic pain), such as with cancer treatment or chronic back-pain problems, which as it happens now entails occasional, as-judged-necessary use of morphine. It also tangentially involves issues of some patients’ potential to get addicted to painkillers. But there was no direct-to-consumer material we worked on (or nothing that wasn’t already established). There was nothing we worked on that required FDA approval (at least that, in its wordage or format, was in play with us) as to the content of a distributable item of literature. The worst anecdote I have to tell from AM Medica has to do with one publisher’s copyright-permissions rights being infringed on, which was partly the result of that company’s not interacting well enough with AM Medica when I was there. But this is not a story to warn consumers about a problem for them. Its main interest is in how a Manhattan form of a medical-promotions firm seemed—in its lower-level operations—almost farcical, in my opinion and in line with how New Jersey firms have operated, in some of what it did.

As to what I discovered recently: a few facts actually undergird my discussion in this mini-series, and bolster my impression of the firm as a farcical place in 2005. (By the way, in 2005 it had about 15-20 or so workers; empty cubicles and offices suggested its employee roster used to be a good bit larger.) First, I found that the parent company, Access Worldwide (to be looked at more in Part 2), bought AM Medica in 1998. Second, there is a decision in a legal action in federal court (in the Southern District of New York) that is viewable [my summary here is subject to adjustment] regarding the fact that a former employee of the firm, a young woman in a sort of junior account-executive role (or the like), was subject to a lawsuit from AM Medica where it sought a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order against her regarding its beliefs about her allegedly violating some kind of confidentiality pact. This allegation was based on her having taken a job with a rival firm and—as AM Medica seemed to imply was nefariously connected—a former client of AM’s starting to be a client of this new firm. AM actually received a denial of its motion (on the question of the injunction, in an evidentiary hearing, with the decision to follow); in the interesting decision, the judge notes that AM’s contention that the woman took a new job only when/because the other firm got the former client of AM’s (as if implying her actionable intent) had no foundation established in the hearing/discovery preceding the decision. In short, this suit was a way of AM Medica’s trying to squelch a former employee’s getting better opportunities at another job, under the theory (whether disingenuous or not, I don’t know) of claiming violation of confidentiality strictures. The decision showed there was no merit to this. This court action—in 2003—was about two years before I started working there—as a temporary worker through a placement agency. (As we will see in Part 2, the turnover there was weirdly rapid.)

Third, I found that AM seems no longer to exist as a company at all; the trade name appears to be owned by an individual who works (or is recorded as being) on the East Side of Manhattan. So, the trade name was assumed (bought? At a sort of  “fire sale” when the company was closing?) by a solo practitioner. My analysis here in no way implies that this person isn’t reputable or capable (I don’t know who she is, and have not contacted her). Indeed, the company’s having vanished, with only its name surviving for use by a solo professional, is quite consistent with my own analysis of AM in this mini-series, while not impugning what she is doing. Anyway, my point in this series is not so much to argue for the shakiness of a company as for how outlandish a work situation I was in—doing temp work, with a horrendous commute, across the Hudson River in Manhattan, when the work after a while seemed totally trivial for me professionally, never mind what my placement agency, GLG, was making off my back in the process.

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Further, the AM Medica story provides me with an opportunity to comment on—as it happens, regarding the copyright-infringement issue I just mentioned—the oddness (in my experience) of psychological publishers (which I alluded to here, in the second paragraph), which I wanted to give a few more, short anecdotes on. We will see one in Part 2 of this mini-series. (The anecdote here will be on a publisher we dealt with for permissions purposes.)

Coincidental resonance with some current events

Lastly among what makes this tale a “crossroads,” the AM Medica story seems to “resonate” with a certain area of current events today—the George Washington Bridge scandal (“Bridgegate”). Now I am not seeking to “pile on” with hands-rubbing commentary on this New Jersey–political (and serious legal) matter, nor do I seek to (as some might mock me for) “make relevant” to current matters of import some “precious old story of my own [in the workplace world].” In fact, the AM Medica story has been “on my blog-story agenda” for some time, back into at least December 2013, and I really don’t want to draw any parallels between it and what we see plenty of coverage of in the local and national media right now, in “Bridgegate.”

But there is one area of overlap between the two: in working at AM Medica, I had to commute to New York City five days a week. (Of course, where I crossed the Hudson—in a bus—was at the Lincoln Tunnel, not the GWB. But the principle suggested here still applies.) The commute itself was a monster: about two and a half hours one way, which included the varied modes of my driving to a commuter-bus station about 20 minutes from home; taking the bus in the New Jersey Transit system (over an hour’s trip); and then walking in Manhattan from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to my place of work in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, about 15 blocks (I didn’t want to take the subway, even in inclement weather). All this traveling itself was a grueling aspect of my workday, never mind what happened at the workplace during my day there.

In this gig I came to appreciate just how tough it was for anybody to work in Manhattan, and why higher pay for all sorts of jobs there seems more than justified. Also, in such a situation, you become aware of what a “nuclear power plant” of the economy NYC is. Old infrastructure, blaring evidence of hectic commerce, busy/stolid people—all provide a whole new atmosphere in which to be part of an exciting and tiring area in which to work. The stress of the whole enterprise is like the “ambient radiation” of this “nuclear power plant.”

The last thing you need in this milieu is someone in a political “high place” interfering, in bad faith, with transportation tools and infrastructure. You better believe that the infrastructure and vehicles of mass transit—bridges, tunnels, buses, trains, passenger cars—are all performing as they should to keep the larger economic engine operating as it should. In short, in this context, it is never a good “time for traffic problems,” deliberately induced by an officer of the governor’s office or some other state-government employee.

What is a “placement agency” and what kind of “freelancer” was I at AM Medica?

It is important, if on its face a little tedious, to understand something about how “placement agencies” operate. I covered some of this in this entry from 2012, where I talked about what is a freelancer versus other types of editors. The fact is that the lines between the types of work arrangements that are relevant here—freelance and temporary (or “temp”) being the chief terms—have become blurred, because of actual practices set up by company managers as well as average people’s understandings (whether effective in the work context or not). For instance, you hear of people “temping” and, in a TV sitcom where the writing may be naïve at times about a range of things, you hear an assumption voiced that temp work is minimum-wage. Actually, when you work as an editor through a placement agency, you could make well, well above minimum wage, and it’s important to understand what this means, both in your favor as the worker, and not.

Let’s try to make this simple:

A freelancer—per such definitions as those of the Editorial Freelancers Association (as I knew it when a member in the 1990s)—is a worker who contracts independently with a company (often, a publisher), not through an agency. You do a specific job—say, copy edit a book manuscript—per an agreement that was made ahead of time. This could include what seems a high hourly rate, say, $25 an hour. There may be a hard-and-fast time limit to the work, or an expectation of a due date with a provision to extend the time a bit if needed. I learned how to contract with employers along these lines. It isn’t hard to do, but you have to have a track record of sorts that allows you to “hang out your shingle,” and seek work over the long term, as this kind of worker. And it could well be demanding work in its own way—along with the longer-term trouble posed by dry spells when you aren’t able to line up work for a given period.

A temp of the most commonplace kind is a worker who is employed by a “temp agency,” where the agency finds places (client companies) for you to work. The stint could be days, weeks, or months; and a given, ongoing stint could be extended at will by the client you are working for (and at). The pay rate is a steady rate for a given job (or type of job), and it is dictated to you ahead of time (usually there isn’t wiggle room for you to negotiate a rate). And the pay is usually with taxes taken out—it is a payroll situation. You are employed by the temp agency and it takes care of your financial arrangement (including your being paid, and taxes being handled professionally, etc.—which all is permitted by the client’s paying the temp agency). (This all may seem like common sense, but it is amazing how this “structure” was violated in the case of The Guy Louise Group in 2006-07.) This while your specific, daily work is managed by the staff managers you work under at the client.

Typical agencies of this temp sort have been Manpower, Olsten, various “brands” under the corporate umbrella of the Robert Half company, and a host of smaller firms (some seem to spring up in an almost ad hoc fashion). A lot of craft-level workers like this arrangement, because they are relieved of the worry of looking for work and resolving any emergent problem of getting paid properly (as can happen in some rare instances in the freelance mode described above). (There are temp agencies even for lawyers and accountants.)

Temporary work involving what I call a placement agency rather combines these two types of work modes. A placement agency is your employer; it finds you the work, and pays you, usually in payroll fashion, with taxes taken out, etc. But the type of work you do, especially as an editor, is presumably the skilled, rare kind that you usually proffer and perform when working as a freelancer as described above. And typically, the pay rates for placement agency editors is pretty high per hour (say, $25 to $30 an hour, or higher).

If someone (working at a client company at which you worked in this mode) were to think—in line with commonplace assumptions that do not square with proper workplace thinking—that you were “merely a temp” who, per the commonplace assumption, “gets low pay per hour,” that person would be naïve, if not downright abusive if he or she spoke disrespectfully to you on the basis of these assumptions.

I had worked as a “temp” of the old-fashioned kind—through Olsten—in 1994-95, at the client of MetLife in its pensions and annuities division offices in East Hanover, N.J. After having done this, for reasons I won’t specify here (and not related to MetLife, which was nice in its handling of me), I never wanted, nor want today, to work as this kind of temp again. And the pay was fairly low—starting at $9 an hour, I think, going up to $10 an hour. I would have to consult records, to double-check. But working as a temp this way was a step down from my prior editorial stint at Clinicians Publishing Group, where the pay was about $12.50 an hour. (This all could prompt an interesting anecdote from 1995, but “let’s not go there” right now.)

When I worked at Prentice Hall in 1997-98, being one of the several proofreaders in the art/production department handling a massive high school-literature textbook project, I was employed through a temp agency, which I suppose could have been called a placement agency, though I wouldn’t have used the term then (I hadn’t heard of it yet—and I don’t think this agency used it for itself, either). I don’t offhand remember the pay rate, but it might have been about $12 an hour. I found there were numerous temp agencies used by Prentice Hall for such work—including small ones with such droll names as “Here’s Help” (recently I discovered there is [or was] a branch of this in a town in Orange County, N.Y., distant from where Prentice Hall was in New Jersey). Such smaller agencies seemed to have sprung up like toadstools after a summer rain in the area of where Prentice Hall (and other large firms) were located in Bergen County, N.J.

The one I worked for was in a hole-in-the-wall office in or near Paramus, N.J., and one guy who ran it, a glib, hardworking fellow, talked about us temps being “guaranteed”—but I never knew what this meant. They never tested us, at least for any specific, sophisticated editorial skills (or if they did, it was in a rudimentary fashion). We were basically taken on faith. And the way things worked, it was as if such firms were “making hay while the sun shone”—they ferried temps Prentice Hall’s way while the massive textbook project chugged on, raking in the money (allowed by our working) while it was to be gathered, almost like a plethora of leaves on the lawn on a fall day.

I didn’t actually get into a situation involving a placement agency, which connoted a sort of selective type of firm for “special client needs,” until I started working for Horizon Graphics in spring 2001.

Sidebar: Semi-defensive comment. If this seems—especially if you have worked in these capacities—as if I am being ponderous and either repeating the obvious or being overly ornate in explaining points, I am trying to eliminate ambiguity—because, in fact, it would shock you how people, starting in the middle of the last decade, who were presumably well ensconced in the “placement agency” or “temp” world, could seem to run well afoul of the basic assumptions of this type of work. For instance, by about 2002, it became evident I should use the term placement agency to describe the type of place I will look at next, because this kind of place’s air of exclusivity, high pay, and supposed safeguards made this kind of temporary work different from a more usually-conceived “temp’s”—which should also help show how AM Medica’s using me in 2005 as if I were the usual, old-time kind of “temp,” even while The Guy Louise Group seemed to use me (from its own angle) as a means to keep its business model afloat, suggests there was becoming something extensively rotten in the “state” of “temping Denmark.” This is to say nothing of what happened with GLG in 2006-07.

The bare essentials of such a firm, with my critical comments and tones withheld, are that they took on temporary workers, who may have been tested (for work skills) in some way (usually with tests—of specific workers for specific jobs—that were supplied by the client firms, not created by Horizon itself), and who then worked for client firms at high rates per hour, often with confidentiality agreements involved (usually administered by and at the client).

In rough outline, things went well for me with Horizon Graphics. I had work that, hourly and on average, paid more than just about anything else I’d ever done, and this went on through what looks now like a halcyon period for such stuff—2001 into 2003.

More precisely, my gravy-train days with Horizon Graphics ran from May 2001 until about late 2003. This started (in 2001) when I worked very briefly for a division of what was called CommonHealth, which at the time was a large confederation of what had originally been separate little advertising and promotion agencies; and this two-and-a-half-year period included my working numerous stints at different companies, including an eight-month continuous stretch at another division of CommonHealth (in 2002-03). After a relatively busy summer with Horizon in 2003, Horizon seemed to be going dormant, because it had run out of work for various of us temps. (Three of us had our time stopped at once at one firm, as it decided not ever to use Horizon’s services again.)

Then I had a few spaced-apart, little stints at other client(s) through Horizon into 2004, but the gravy train, in a sense, through Horizon had ended for me in about September 2003. (And similar had happened for one or more other temps employed through it.) In fact, Horizon got to a state where one of its principals, a John DiS., moved the “operation” from its Boonton office into his home in Montclair, where the business phone line also rang. I never had work from Horizon again after this move had happened, though I had been in touch with them until sometime in late 2004, I think.

Meantime, someone—actually, an employee of CommonHealth I was familiar with—tipped me off in early 2004 to another placement agency, The Guy Louise Group. I thought that was a funny name for an agency—it didn’t seem like an obvious big deal of a firm. Well, I would end up having, on average, more work, and more money, through GLG from April 2004 until, roughly speaking, very early 2007 than I had made through Horizon. The rest of the story on GLG’s history will wait.

Opening the door to AM Medica—from a more practical and subjective standpoint

I had wanted to write this set of entries on AM Medica mainly, if not entirely, from memory, with a certain “soft focus” and elliptical quality that somehow, at the time, characterized my experience there. But I decided to dig up some records, whatever I had, on it. This story isn’t like that of Jason Aronson, where the more you rooted the story in facts with exhibits to back them up, the more interesting it became. AM Medica was a place where precision, concrete accomplishment, and common sense often seemed beside the point.

When I dug out an envelope with clots of paper from several places I worked at through Guy Louise—branches of CommonHealth; Torre Lazur; Roche (the pharmaceutical company—the only one I ever worked within); and others—I found only a little stuff on AM Medica. But even so, what I saw gave me a little bit of the creeps. The weirdness of the experience wafted off the old paper, a bit.

After you’ve worked years in the medical promotions industry, you’re struck by how you have (in your records) so little proof of what you did there. I mean, with the publishers I typically worked at in the 1990s, you always ended up—even if it seemed (prospectively) hard to accomplish at the time—with work samples, some of which could be quite good (even if you had to accumulate a lot of banal or non-career-serving work in the process of getting the samples you really wanted, or that could testify to your best talents). When you worked for small places, despite all the negatives, you could get samples you could use in work applications, in photocopy form, for years afterward.

Not so with medical-promotions places. Because they are so corporate—and managed almost as if to forestall anyone taking a lot of credit (in readily established evidence) for what that person contributed to a finished product—you end up having spent years in that arena, and yet with very little in the way of evidence of your solid work there. This is aside from the proscriptions these companies might impose on your revealing much evidence of what you did behind their closed doors. I mean, even if you wanted some evidence—if you took a chance on abrogating their confidentiality agreements, perhaps with excellent cause or legal justification—there still isn’t much you can have evidence of. This is even in cases where you might have worked somewhere where a lot of paper—including of drafts or iterations of work you served as a craftsman—was generated, some of which ended up in your possession.

Sure, you can have tons of timesheets (whether from the placement agency or linked more directly to your work for the client), and pieces of personal paper, such as I scribbled my times spent on individual accounts, as has long been my practice in the medical-promo realm. But more generally, you could still seem (by virtue of your memory, at very least) to have done a lot of putting in time somewhere, which was duly entered into clients’ accounting systems—but evidence in your possession of the actual media products you helped craft…? Very little.

AM Medica was no exception to this, but this place even took this phenomenon to a bit of an extreme: there seemed to be a “bias” to big money numbers there, so much so that that is where I first got a grip (and in rather gargantuan terms) on how medical-promo firms tend to “pad” bills to the client. A freelance editor there—who apparently was hired in the more strictly “Editorial Freelancers” style of working—could get paid $100 an hour. The total billed to the client for this editor, including what was noted “accounting-wise” as an “AM Medica markup” (whatever that meant), could be $250 an hour, covering the $100 an hour that went to the editor.

But what did I actually work on? What did this company produce? And was the firm making good use of me?

Let’s go to a more direct look at the place—and remember that I got here because The Guy Louise Group wanted to break into the New York City work market—and seemed to have me as its only worker in that market for a good part of 2005, and GLG even suggested to me that it didn’t want me to leave until AM Medica was good and ready to. (But when this was, wasn’t entirely clear for a long time….)

The company’s main line of products at the time, and the specific account I was on

AM Medica by 2005 seemed mainly to be for arranging “medical education” sessions, or “conferences” (the typical industry term), which was the sort of thing some New Jersey firms also have done, either as a sideline that was minor in the firm’s larger set of offerings or as a main function. Here, “medical education” was mainly promotion of a certain pharmaceutical product. This area of the blurring of the ideas/principles of “education” and promotions/sales (initiated by Big Pharma companies) has been looked at by The New York Times in articles over a number of years within the past decade. It is not my intention to parse (or tell anecdotes in) this whole area, to show just what kind of work was education versus promotions. By and large, and in my general opinion, the firms I worked at—whether through the placement agency Horizon Graphics or that of GLG—that featured “medical education” mainly were fashioning modes of promotions.

When I was at AM Medica, the main account I was aware of (and which I worked on) was a pain-management medication, Avinza, which was specifically in the synthetic-opioid category. And I think the only “product” I was helping produce was an educational session, which I think took place in July (at a hotel somewhere, as these things often do). This project involved—and these firms often have workers dedicated just to this—booking doctors onto flights and stays in hotels, and of course there was a panoply of educational materials to produce. There was typically a big PowerPoint presentation, boiling down the educational points for doctors’ viewing; and typically there was a duplicate set of these slides that had narrative for a lecturer to follow (and which, of course, were “for his eyes only”), which generally fleshed out the PowerPoint copy a little.

In general with such projects, there could also be handouts of various sorts for the attendees.

With this Avinza project, there were a slew of handouts. As best as I can determine, pain management involving opioid medications—such as in standardized treatment of back ailments, cancer, and other medical issues—is a particular specialty involving some key things:

* its own concerns about how to best administer a medication that can lend itself easily to addiction;

* the semi-subjective but clinically important measurement of pain; and

* generally seeming to be a stepchild among health-care specialties.

As a result, with this area of medicine there seems to be an intellectually neat-enough set of concerns, and not a whole lot of cutting-edge science, to be represented in the “medically circumspect” information to be presented in backing up use of a medication at hand. (I mean, there are innovations or refinement in treatment, but there are not the technological advances, or need for same, such as you might see in heart surgery or cancer treatment. For instance, one historical fact in the area of pain management is that doctors reached a point years ago where they eschewed use of morphine [with its obvious liabilities]; but then, in more recent years [more than a decade ago], they started using morphine again, in certain cases or situations.)

Now in AM Medica’s case, so much of the material on pain management, addiction issues (and the related potential for patients’ criminal behavior), and so on was relatively established, and held by such reputable entities as the American Academy of Pain Medicine. (See End note.) Thus, all AM Medica really wanted to do to accumulate a slew of handouts for the educational meetings was pull almost all of it off the Internet, such as from an organization’s own cache of useful documents provided for the public or others.

The freelance editor briefly involved with this project, a young woman of about 23 who lived in Manhattan, worked at AM Medica for a few weeks (and even had a company e-mail address set up for her), and her charge was mainly to search for and pull the various items off the Internet (which she had a definite skill at searching for). Meanwhile, a lot of the printed material would be photocopied and stapled, by a factotum there, a man with an Arab name (who was very nice), who worked in an office/photocopying room; he was like a cross between a one-man band and a train engineer, getting all his office machines cranking away, collectively almost like a cacophonous carnival contraption. He assembled packets and other relevant material for conference attendees. He stayed in the office; meanwhile, some of AM Medica’s other workers would descend on the distant conference scene like a SWAT team of electronically coordinated media crack operators.

. 

So the company was little more than a sort of audio-visual “support” entity, but with editors who turned up on the scene of the educational conference to help manage the logistics and technical issues, while whatever doctor(s) was/were lined up to lead the conference did their thing (lecturing, primarily).

I believe that, in the past, when it had also apparently been a not-large standalone company, AM Medica had produced “original” media material as a main function. This had been, as far as I know, in the 1990s (or starting before, and into the 1990s), when (as best as I could see) it was also distinctly less flim-flam-ish than it struck me in 2005. (As I said early on, it was acquired by an offshore parent company in 1998; whether a direct result of this was that it became more flim-flam-ish, I don’t know.) (I could only find glimpses of its history in the old files I found in offices that had been vacated by former workers, some of them long-timers who had left not too long before, presumably at the “behest” of coldly changing times that led the firm to be more apt to engage in “educational conferences.” For instance, I found it had once employed—in about 1997—a freelance medical editor, Melissa C., who had worked for Clinicians Publishing Group in 1993 and who was a good freelance medical writer.)

In fact, in 2005, AM Medica still had an arm that, as a small sideline, produced ghostwritten articles or the like for outside entities. One coworker, a nice, somewhat “wisely reserved” Indian American woman named Raveena (I think), seemed to have responsibility for this area. I think I did only a little work (like proofreading/copy editing) for some of her stuff. (Raveena ended up resigning while I was still there—she was “pleasantly discreet” about her plans, almost as if a reflection on how crazy the place was.)

My immediate—and none too pleasing—boss (a start)

My boss was a Jay Petal (I won’t spell out her full first name; and I use a pseudonymous surname); she was/is Indian American. (Raveena also was this; but as a measure of things, Raveena generally [or sometimes with healthy situational irony] looked rather askance at Jay.) Jay was, at first, the main contact for placement agency GLG’s dealing with me. But there was another woman, whose name was (I’ll disguise it) Kristine De Tour, who (after a bit of time) handled the dry logistics of my scheduling issues; definitely she was my person at AM for these details later in my time there. Kristine was a sort of admin to the company chief executive, a genial enough, middle-aged man named Steadman (or Stedman) [but his surname I’ve forgotten].

Jay was a pain in the ass. She had a Ph.D., but in an academic or learned-professional’s sense; her degree was in something related to odd variation on medical research, if I recall. As the staff manager who was overseeing medical copy in the way of controlling what we editorial underlings did, as far as her degree went, she was not what you typically saw (as far as I’d seen in New Jersey firms).

This was to say nothing of her manner of managing things. I mean, she had her wits about her for certain passing functions—and in general, we editors all can seem not quite matched to current editorial work given our original degrees. But Jay was not really a hands-on type of editor, though she did seem to have an eye for the content of the printed material I was dealing with under her. And in terms of my trying to get her cooperation on the hands-on stuff I was dealing with, she could be very difficult.

(Subsection to be continued in Part 2.)

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End note.

To be clear: we did get information—such as printed documents—directly from some organizations like this, and I know this one (the American Academy of Pain Medicine) was among those we marshaled in some form or another under our umbrella of resources for the Avinza conference; but whether this particular organization provided printed educational materials, I don’t remember.