POTUS possibilities: Starting to adjust to a possible queasy-making scenario

Whether you like Donald Trump or not, it seems not a bad idea, given how far along he is in getting delegates to be the Republican nominee at the summer party convention, to start envisioning, and somewhat coming to terms with, what a White House with him in it might be like.

We need not feel this is inevitable (and I certainly don’t plan on voting for him), but trying to anticipate what might, to some, seem an appalling prospect is a little like preparing emotionally for surgery. You know, imagine what the painful, risk-spotted journey will be like. Anticipating the evils can help us absorb them a little better if/when they come. And if Trump doesn’t become president, we’re OK; and maybe we will have “geared up for a rough ride” for how bumpy the White House will be if someone else gets elected we’re not sanguine about.

First, think of the broad conception that some have lately held: an outsider is running for president. He will shake things up policy-wise, and talks about getting tough with our overseas enemies, in a way he presupposes our current pres is not doing well enough. He has been employed as an entertainer, while having held other positions (and in some respects, in some of his career, he may have proven to be little more substantial than a vacuous figurehead), leading some to have asked stoutly, “How is he qualified to be president?” His defenders will quickly rejoin: “Aside from the debate of his own standing, it depends if he gets a really good Cabinet around him.” A popular comical TV show has made jokes about the idea of him becoming president.

Who am I talking about? Trump?

How about Ronald Reagan. Yes, that one who’s considered such a saint today.

(And yes, a joke was made—as if the joke couldn’t be more obvious—about a possible Reagan presidency on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.)

I remember from the 1980 campaign: so much, seemingly to my young mind anyway, of Reagan’s platform was to “get tough with the Russians.” (This was unsettling, if not merely reflective of an unrealistic cast of mind we saw in him, for those of us of an age to possibly be drafted, if the draft were reinstated. I remember when Reagan won in November 1980, a fellow college student could be heard uttering on the street, “Get ready to fight”—i.e., as a foot soldier. At the time, I didn’t think the prospect of our going to war was that strong.)

Never mind that the big military buildup that Reagan was, for years, given credit for actually started in Carter’s last term, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“Yes,” you say, “but whether Trump gets good people around him is really up in the air. Reagan had solid people.”

Really? Let’s recall:

* David Stockman, his budget director, who famously in about 1982 was (per the journalists’ metaphor) “taken to the woodshed” for a spanking by Reagan, so to speak, after Stockman had commented in some forum that Reagan’s economic trickle-down budget work was “basically smoke and mirrors” (quotes in this whole entry are sometimes from memory; some may not be exact). If Stockman was out of step here at all, it was in being truthful, and I recall him as holding up honorably over many years; but it showed some of the rot (policy-wise, at least) in the Reagan revolution.

* Ed Meese, Reagan’s blah blob of an attorney general. I think Meese proved to be weakest when he did a soft-peddling initial investigation of the Iran-contra scandal shortly after it broke in November 1986. It then took extensive congressional hearings, which made for TV theater in the warm-season months of 1987, to get more of the truth out.

* Off-color comedy, you want? How about James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior, who made headlines when (I had to read his Wikipedia article to get clear on this), in responding to the issue of whether he had diversity in a certain panel, he said, “I’ve got a Black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” (I remembered the “woman” component, erroneously, as “Oriental.”) Also, as I’d forgotten till I read the Wiki article, there was a kerfuffle where he forbade the Beach Boys to play at a holiday summer event on the National Mall, thinking they would attract the wrong element. (I mean, even for 1984, Watt was well “out of it.”)

##

These were among Reagan’s Cabinet, but perhaps some of the worst problems with his presidency, leaving aside the Iran-contra scandal, were his shows of a high-handed dismissiveness (in almost an amateurish way) that he had toward the Soviets, which made him seem like a bumpkin scarily too close to the “nuclear football.” Remember his joking remark, when sound-testing was done for a radio show, and which upset the Soviets when it was picked up and broadcast, about how “The Soviet Union has been outlawed; we begin bombing in five minutes”?

Also, when the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner in about late 1983 (out of their over-abundance of caution about their borders), though this wasn’t Reagan’s fault, it was part of a larger picture, composed of many notable un-encouraging moments from 1981 through ’83, where by no means did it seem we were making glorious headway with winding down the Cold War.

On Reagan’s part, it would take some moderation, vision-oriented practical-mindedness, helpful political developments on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and probably no small amount of subtle influence from his wife Nancy to get him to be the adept statesman with the Soviets he has gotten credit for in more recent years, starting (stumblingly) in about October 1986 when he first met with Mikhail Gorbachev (a particular meeting that did not go well for Reagan). In 1987, Reagan got into more of a stride of winding down the arms-race insanity with the Soviets, such as a significant arms-reduction treaty later in the year. This would not have cohered with how he rhetorically and diplomatically dealt with the Soviets in his first term.

##

So, not being conclusive about the whole-Cabinet idea, if Trump was elected, and Chris Christie joined his cabinet, what type of role would Christie take? A James Watt type? (If CC was Secretary of the Interior, aside from the “promise” of controversial remarks, maybe he would be pressed by an HR type on needing qualifications like knowing what to do about forest fires. Brushfires like “Bridgegate”—a different matter, and one with mixed reviews.)

Or maybe some have thought CC would make a good Spiro Agnew, with that older-era man’s enemies-strafing rhetoric such as referring to journalists as “nattering nabobs of negativity.” But Agnew was from a different administration—one that, regarding its more-colorful members, nobody is holding up as exemplary lately.

Movie break: A subdued study-like film good for students, of Hitchcock or otherwise: The Wrong Man (1956), Part 1 of 2

This came amid his great train of works from Rear Window to Marnie, and would almost be forgotten, yet shares some trademark qualities with the others

[Note: This blog entry was in process for weeks before today’s sad news emanated out of Belgium. Suffice it to say that, while you (I) don’t know whether it is worse to hear the content of this news or to endure the tedium and upset of the “haranguing,” drawn-out way it seems to be covered (at least on the radio), the fun aspects of this blog entry aren’t meant to make light of the bad news, while on the other hand, my points about legal process in the U.S. unexpectedly but neatly serve to show how we get along, or try to, in this country, unlike the more authoritarian and violent style of the likes of ISIS.]

First, a passing note on Morley Safer (he’s back on TV, showing the spirit is willing…): [Update 5/12/16: On May 11, CBS announced that Morley Safer is retiring from work at CBS and 60 Minutes.] No, this is not an obituary. Relative old coot that I am, I enjoy watching 60 Minutes on TV on Sunday nights. But I realize that, like so much else in American pop and slightly-more-high-class culture in the past 15 or so years, people have disappeared (either retired to Florida or elsewhere; been quietly removed from their positions; or gone to the next world—with attendant or coincidental broad changes in what passes for market-wise stuff in the media, increasingly oriented to the likes of rabid fans of Jennifer Lawrence). Well, Morley Safer was the last of the old-time 60 Minutes crew, the bunch that started in the late 1960s and ’70s, like Mike Wallace (now deceased), Andy Rooney (ditto; he started in the late ’70s, but still seeming an original member), and even producer Don Hewitt (deceased). I made a loving joke about Morley in this fall 2012 blog entry: Movie break: An “adult picture” on an issue that concerns everyone—corporate malfeasance affecting nationally distributed products and health: The Insider (1999), Part 2 of 2; URL here. My point there wasn’t to scorn Morley; it was to speak with humor such as I try to make typical of my blogs, but trying to bridge my own long familiarity with Morley with likely audiences’ younger-eye aesthetics: I could say, “You know Morley Safer, right?” and they could say, “But he looks so old—like he’s 600.” So, how joke by way of sharing my enthusiasm for someone who seems “so old”?

Well, much more recently, I’d wondered where Morley has been for some time. When Bob Simon died in early 2015, Morley was quoted (on TV camera) in a news item; he looked older and seemed to speak with a bit of a slur. Was he, over the longer term, not well enough to appear on TV anymore? Then, this past March 13, he had a segment on 60 Minutes, interviewing a newly arrived, successful Danish architect. As a longtime connoisseur of 60 Minutes pieces, I was struck by how many different “edits” of Morley’s narrated comments there were—I mean, no surprise such piecemeal editing can go on, but his voice sounded quite different in different bits. Sometimes he seemed a bit slur-apt and mannered; other times, like his old self.

But let’s be charitable, along my with speculating (and of course, how he’s doing in his health is in large part his own “bee’s wax”): he sometimes speaks not entirely well (effect of medication? Did he have a minor stroke? Is some other ailment responsible?); his face seems to show a light as if he’s emerged transcendently from the shadows of less-than-full health, but I thought on March 13 that his eyes looked a bit unusual: had he had an operation on them? For cataracts? And I noticed in one or two shots that he was standing with a cane, which he’d never been shown using before.

So, at age 84, he’s no longer in JV-football-player health. But it was good to see him back on TV, doing a segment with, intellectually, the allusive richness and elegant phrasing we’ve come to expect from him. You know the poem, “Death, be not proud…”; well, allowing old veterans in the media to do their thing in advanced age is a way of saying, “Old age (and possible need for Geritol and adult undergarments), be not proud….”

Subsections below (Part 1):

The film takes a civics-lesson approach that was not uncommon in the later 1950s

Hitch opted for an exercise in “neorealism,” but ended up with another well-crafted team effort

Basic facts about the case, and Manny’s stigmatization

Typical Hitchcock touches

Subsections to come in Part 2:

Herrmann’s restrained score both helps define this 1956 film and is one shared trait among several between this film and 1976’s Taxi Driver

The casting, and the question of Hitchcock’s Catholicism

Vera Miles is excellent as the acutely depressed Rose; and elements of psychological understanding and of joking

[Edit 3/24/16. Part 2 of this review is here.]

I’m glad I finally got to see The Wrong Man, after having heard about it in various contexts for a good number of years. For today’s young audiences, even if they are eager to make the acquaintance of Hitchcock, this could well be kept for their later viewing, when they’re older. I think that, for the average caffeine-charged, body-pierced, smartphone-addicted avid young filmlover, it’s about as “happening” as chewing on a feather duster. But to me in my older years, already well familiarized with Hitch, I found this film quite pleasant to check out, though, at least at first, my pleasure was often in how technically it was made. Vera Miles in her performance as Rose, the wife of the wrongly-accused hero (“Manny” Balestrero, played by Henry Fonda), is quite good, and a big step up from the relatively small part she plays as the pinched, impatient sister of Marion Crane in Hitch’s Psycho (1960).

The interesting thing about this film is that, while it was famously based on a real-life case of mistaken identity/arrest/trial that was featured in a magazine in 1953 and was even portrayed in a 1950s TV movie of some kind, it was the first time Hitchcock portrayed a real-life situation in a feature-length film. He even appears in a direct-to-the-camera introduction, explaining the basic situation—that this work, as a nonfictional suspense story, features more odd twists than did the fictional stories he’d earlier presented.

The film takes a civics-lesson approach that was not uncommon in the later 1950s

But this film isn’t just an entertaining technical stunt from Hitchcock (or one of “biographical import,” in relation to the oft-told story of how his father had had five-year-old Alfred put in a jail cell to teach him a lesson, which supposedly haunted Alfred ever after). It comes among several films of the 1950s by various directors that dealt, in ways different in content or angle, with issues of miscarriage of justice, abuse of legal process, mistaken identity in a legal context, and/or the like. On the 2008 DVD for Touch of Evil, commenter and professor James Naremore mentions how there were more films that addressed social justice in the 1950s, which is otherwise thought of as a drily conformist decade, than there tend to be today (on average; he spoke in ~2008), while Touch of Evil was also radical (in his approving view) in its esthetic approach.

But it’s true that social and legal issues were embraced in what now seems a surprisingly concentrated way in that later-Eisenhower era, not just with Welles’ 1958 film, which deals with corruption of personality impacting detective work (centered on falsified evidence), but with Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957), which today helps teach us how a jury should function regarding the issue of reasonable doubt; and even Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), particularly in its trial scene, where the theme of a railroading “show trial,” where men are wrongly tried and convicted for symbolic reasons or in order to intimidate a broader populace, is especially well depicted. (Whatever public consciousness there was throughout the 1950s of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s in the Soviet Union and the associated novelistic derivative by Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, along with considered review of the McCarthyist abuses of the early 1950s—à la anti-Communist witch hunts—all would have provided important cultural background to the 1950s films’ intellectual agendas.)   

Hitch’s film may seem the most subdued and buttoned-down, in a sense, of all these films, but together they show that on some level, intelligent members of society were concerned with the questions of what to do when, even in an enlightened society like the U.S.’s, the justice system malfunctions? And this was a few years before the Miranda decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, instituting guarantees of the rights of arrested citizens to their being shielded from improper treatment by investigating officers. While Hitchcock’s film also deals, as do these other films, with matters falling under criminal (or military) law (and even if Hitch was concerned, somewhat like Franz Kafka, with the dark, going-haywire potential of these situations, especially in their psychological impact on the innocent victims), still, whether in a civil-law context or not, the theme of a justice system going screwy, whether due to bad-faith motivations or simple mistakenness, is something that never gets old, and never loses its relevance if Americans want to be good citizens and act in line with consciousness of how their justice system is never foolproof and perfect, and needs vigilant citizens “looking in” to “keep it honest,” just as any other institution of our society needs this vigilance.

(This point can be bolstered in two ways: First, when it comes to the likes of recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the legal philosophy that the U.S. Constitution should only be said to contain, and extend to modern citizens as legal guarantees, what it was “originally” meant to contain [which many could very well consider the views of a rightist crank], should cohere with the fact that we citizens do not want to be in a position to demonstrate, when the occasion warrants, that the Constitution also does not contain language of an especially colorful and coarse nature that we are all too willing to produce volcanically when we protest about being egregiously and self-evidently mishandled by agents of the state. Second, in work situations, ethical complexities or conundrums between peer, low-level workers who have run into conflict within ingenuous frames of mind can be assessed differently years later; but bad management whose egregiousness is clear at the outset never loses its status as bad management.)

Hitch opted for an exercise in “neorealism,” but ended up with another well-crafted team effort

The Wrong Man also was Hitch’s way of imitating a film genre that was newly coming to the States—“kitchen-sink realism,” as it was informally dubbed, or a kind of neorealism that was first being propagated by new Italian filmmakers. I think that, today, one need not be familiar with this genre, or even ask how well (or how much) Hitchcock captures its style in this film. What I think stands the test of time is that, in this kind of story, how the camera follows the proceedings in an almost plodding, hug-the-droll-details way actually helps convey what an alienating experience being wrongly accused and arrested (or otherwise subjected to a high-stakes legal proceeding) can be. Though little moments in this story may seem rather trite or tedious on second or third viewing, the film overall rewards multiple viewings, not just for how technically adept it is, but for how the simple fear and almost soul-crushing sense of damaged name and (family) prospects can explode in a normal, quiet life when the machinery of the state suddenly enters and marches you through its procedures without any real justification in fact.

Hitchcock interviewed various participants in the real case and tried to get his story as close to the facts as possible (Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light [ReganBooks, 2003] pp. 534, 536). He also had the services of playwright Maxwell Anderson, a famed name of the time, who had both written a book on the case [added 3/24/16: Actually, as I look into this, while the Wikipedia article on the film suggests he wrote a book on the case, a brief Google search does not show me solid support for this, and McGilligan does not indicate it, either] and co-wrote the script for Hitchcock; the script has a conscientious, level-headed way of walking us through all the details most key to a digestible story. Angus MacPhail also helped with the screenplay (and both Anderson and MacPhail would be tapped by Hitch to work on the succeeding film Vertigo, though neither ended up in the final credits, though some of their ideas [or, in MacPhail’s case, his ethnic background] did contribute to that film).

Then, Hitch used his trusty production team of Robert Burks for cinematography (here, atypically for Burks, working in black-and-white, which comes out fine, giving the film a noir flavor without being stagy); George Tomasini for editing (the film is quite crisply edited, even with some scenes fading out almost too quickly); and Bernard Herrmann for music, along with Herbert Coleman for associate producing (check all Hitch’s major films of 1954-64 for the presence of members of this production team).

The production director for this film was Paul Sylbert (born 1928), brother of the equally illustrious production designer Richard, and Paul speaks on the 2004 DVD.

With Hitch’s standard way of storyboarding an entire film (shot by shot), which is one thing that makes his films still so watchable today, The Wrong Man is quite well put together, even if the story might not grip or affect everybody, equally, today. This story is helped in accessibility by being made by a crack production team at the top of their game within a succession of films that is possibly one of the most artistically successful trains of consecutive films by one director in all of cinema (I’ve seen all of Hitch’s films from 1954 to 1964 except for all of To Catch a Thief [1955], which to me has always seemed like fluff I could just as well skip). (It’s like the phenomenon of how even a relative clunker within the series of films done by Steven Spielberg within his decade-plus of mostly adult films, from 1993, the year of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, to about 2005, the year of Munich, still seems well done, because a prime director in his fifties is steadily working, and fully effectively, with trusted associates.)

Basic facts about the case, and Manny’s stigmatization

How much the specific facts of this story reflect, bit for bit, the facts of the real case isn’t entirely clear, but it seems the general method Hitchcock used was to follow all the relevant facts, no matter how mundane. Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a player of an acoustic stand-up bass in a dance band at the Stork Club in NYC, stopped by a life insurance company office to see about taking out a loan on his wife’s policy (this sort of thing is still possible to do, as I did it back in the 1990s) to cover expenses. In this case, the emergent expense was $300 for extraction of impacted wisdom teeth his wife had. Early on, when the family seems in hunky-dory spirits, the couple acknowledges they have to struggle a bit with money at times, but his wife doesn’t yet give the sense of guilt and doom she does later (though a passing remark she makes foreshadows it); the later development is her contracting an acute case of major depression (eventually requiring her to go to inpatient treatment), apparently precipitated by her husband’s arrest. In this later case, her depression not only builds on her feeling that she has brought the misfortune on them because (as she blames herself unfairly) she isn’t a good wife in handling money well, but eventually she starts talking paranoid, as if “they” will break the family down through willy-nilly prosecution of the case so that Manny is imprisoned no matter what they do.

When Manny stops by the insurance company, some women working there suddenly get the notion he was the man who had robbed them some weeks ago (the time of the film is mid-January 1953, and some of the robberies the film refers to happened the previous fall and Christmas season). The film is good at the camera’s coming in close and showing the insurance workers engaging in a kind of acutely worried hugger-mugger, discussing the man at the window (Manny) whom they think is the crook, back for more, even though he is ostensibly asking about his wife’s policy. Shortly after, a level-headed male supervisor will talk to someone at the home office, and eventually—when Manny has left the insurance company office—the police arrange to pick Manny up on his way home and start having him visually inspected by witnesses, and test his handwriting, to see if he is the suspect. From then on, Manny is locked into a mistaken-identity situation, which Hitchcock did in a number of his films. Ironically, in this film, Manny’s name is “mishandled” several times, with some people assuming he goes by “Chris” (short for Christopher), not the “Manny” his close associates know him by; the implication seems to be not only does he become mistakenly in the custody of the city police, but his name gets mangled, adding further to the indignities and rather Kafkaesque oblivion he is sunken into.

Interestingly, near the end of the film, though two of the insurance company women are again enlisted to help identify the real crook, and they spot Manny with his steadfast lawyer at the police station, they hesitate regarding Manny as if feeling awkward but opt not to apologize to him. And the only person Manny confronts in any sense is the crook when the man is ushered past him, and Manny asks him, “Do you know what you did to my wife?” The fact that the insurance woman-workers are never held to account in the story probably reflects Hitchcock’s assessment of these particular women as rather blameworthy in the whole case; it’s more debatable whether this also conforms with his complex and “characteristic” way of regarding women, which of course some have summed up as misogynistic, and which in any event can be at times on the peculiar side, but let’s not go there right now.

##

Some details of the police work are interesting. Of the two cops who do the initial investigating, one, an Italian-looking fellow who does most of the procedural talking and managing, seems trying to be judicious toward Manny, only really starting to seem biased against him after the rather dubious handwriting test is done. The other man, a blond, rather cool-looking sort, seems to regard Manny as guilty from the outset, having a steady, skeptical smile at him when questioning him on something. This reminded me of nothing so much as the character played by Richard Anderson in the trial scene in Paths of Glory, where Anderson’s prosecuting attorney is so bemused and indifferent to the fact he is part of a process of a foreordained conviction of the three soldiers, that his smug manner almost seems wildly satirical, if not for how carefully Kubrick handles the Stalinist quality of the trial, overall.

(The blond policeman in The Wrong Man much later “does penance,” spontaneously becoming something of a hero, by suddenly being seized by some recognition of a possibility after he has passed the new robbery suspect being brought into the 110^th precinct station, the one in charge of Manny’s case. He returns to the office after almost having left for home, presumably to get the ball rolling on having the new “collar’s” case being collated with Manny’s case, toward possibly getting Manny freed from his original case.)

Despite the overall premise that Hitchcock is showing a legal process that is wrong on a key premise (the identity of their suspect) and from then on seems a headlong Kafkaesque nightmare of sorts, the subtlety and tone of the overall proceedings are kept modest and sensible. No burlesque or pointed satire here.

Another thing that seems amusing today is that the attorney helping Manny, Frank O’Connor (Anthony Quayle, to be discussed more in Part 2), who seems all earnest about wanting to help once he’s heard Manny’s story, warns that he has never defended a criminal defendant in a trial before—which in real life would normally be a big red flag, not that the attorney isn’t sincere—and he says they shouldn’t worry about money now (Manny and Rose and already super-strapped); instead, he counsels, let’s just win the case. This is awfully noble of the attorney, and maybe it was something that could happen in the 1950s on behalf of the right, winning-seeming defendant. But this was before the Supreme Court case that established the right to a free public defender for criminal defendants who are indigent; and certainly in this country today, if you are in a civil (not criminal) case, if you have no money for an attorney, no likes of Frank O’Connor is likely to come gallantly your way.

But these quibbles aside, there is enough realistic about this film, or about which we could give the benefit of the doubt, that it is interesting to watch for me, and I would think for anyone old enough to have lost the “baby teeth” of innocent illusions about the U.S. legal system, especially if the person has been in the teeth of a frivolous or abusive proceeding in the past.

Typical Hitchcock touches

It is a measure of how Hitchcock remains an influence and a sort of seminal director that this film is so watchable, and a treasure chest of things to point out as characteristic of his style and, subsequently, of film techniques that have long been adopted by others. By comparison with The Ladykillers (1955), which I reviewed in two parts spread over this blog and my other one, The Wrong Man is a ready delight to watch just for how well it is visually made, whereas The Ladykillers you have to work up some enthusiasm for.

Because The Wrong Man is in black-and-white, there are certain techniques that were already typical by 1956, and often seen in noir, such as “deep focus,” where all persons in a shot are equally in focus, no matter how close they are to the camera. But there is one Hitchcock visual touch—I mean in addition to his variety of interest-generating camera angles and interspersing medium shots with close-ups—that runs through a lot of his films, at least as late as Topaz (1969), which you usually see in his color films: having a table lamp appear conspicuously in a shot, which seems there to elicit some sense of space between us and one or more character(s) in the shot. Sometimes a scene can be split up into shots where they vary as to whether they feature a lamp. We can find this phenomenon in his great-period films Vertigo and North by Northwest (1959). We see it several times in this film, too.

Another touch is using a visual trick, involving no tiny amount of creative engineering, to evoke a sense of acute psychological distress or some other evanescent phenomenon. In Rear Window (1954), we see the pinkish after-image (in Raymond Burr’s character’s eyes) of the flashbulb going off. In Vertigo, we see (especially in the church tower shots) the famous “trombone shot” of a distance-covering image change in elemental texture to show Scottie’s sudden bout of dizziness. And in The Wrong Man, there is a relatively simple shot of Manny sitting, seeming exhausted, in a jail cell, with the shot starting to turn around as if done on a ferris wheel (in fact, it was, on a small custom-made “ferris wheel”), while the music, per Herrmann, evokes the spinning, increasing-chaos sense. This effect may seem a little hokey today, but the intent is appreciated.

Another shot a bit later has Manny in his new cell, with the camera peering at him through a narrow hole in the door (the special DVD extra, Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man, explains something about how this was done), and he paces around a bit; and when he hears his name being called, Fonda gives him a confused, paranoid look, as if he can’t grasp what he’s hearing. As it turns out, he is going to be released from his cell, because his bail has been posted. By this point in the film, Hitchcock has gone a long way to show Manny’s emotional dislocation caused by an arrest we will find is firmly established as wrongly based.

Manny will further prove to be emotionally traumatized when, for instance, as he arrives home, he looks leerily at the place in the street across from his house where the police had been waiting for him two nights ago. Hitchcock was an early master at explicitly depicting psychological dislocation in an age when the popular audiences were hungry for it in films and literature.

To be continued.

R.I.P.: George Martin (1926-2016), first among “fifth Beatles”

There have been numerous people nicknamed (by fans, critics, etc.) “the fifth Beatle” over the 45+ years since The Beatles broke up, but the assessment can fairly apply to several people (as mathematically awkward as that may be), and they can be parsed, with their special distinctions, this way:

Fifth Beatle in terms of securing the business deals of the first five-or-so years of their career, including (as far as I understand) some kind of ~10-year arrangement with Capitol Records and/or EMI starting in 1967: Brian Epstein, their manager.

Fifth Beatle in terms of being a factotum in their early years, and an essential linchpin in keeping their business affairs as a group “together” and able to produce future profits (per their old group identity, not as individual post-breakup artists) after Epstein’s 1967 death and after their business dalliance with Allen Klein: Neil Aspinall (who died in 2008).

Fifth Beatle in terms of being a lovable roadie: Mal Evans (who died in 1976).

But….

Fifth Beatle in artistic terms, in being essential to their development on various levels on records and their control of their art, to the point where, in their latest albums (except for Abbey Road), he could let them manage their own recording sessions more: George Martin.

The obituaries will say as much authoritative stuff as I could on the fly, so check them out (especially, though I haven't read much of it yet, Allan Kozinn’s in The New York Times).

Movie break: An early, still-tasty entry in the area of film black humor: The Ladykillers (1955), Part 2 of 2

The 1955 film should be understood as enjoyable on its own terms, and not so much something by which to compare the Coens’ 2004 work

Part 1 is on my other blog, here.

Subsections below:

The theft: quite different between the films

The crooks’ comeuppance is more chaotic in the older film; the dumping-off-bridge nexus is different but emblematic for both films

The tail-end is remarkably similar in both films

Conclusion

The theft: quite different between the films

One big difference between the 1955 and 2004 versions of The Ladykillers is how the theft is managed. It happens about one-third of the way through the 1955 film, while it is further along in the 2004 film. The way the Coens have the plot element of the men needing to tunnel underground from Ms. Munson’s house to a nearby casino’s underground counting house is, I think, a potent way to introduce a lot of plot development, and helps beef up the 2004 adaptation. In the 1955 film, the robbery is done with the men causing a traffic tie-up and stealing the money, in its metal boxes, from a sort of armored car and putting it into a sort of steamer trunk, loaded onto another vehicle.

Significantly, the 1955 group of crooks transport the trunk to a local train station, and have arranged that Mrs. Wilberforce pick it up on the understanding it contains possessions of the professor’s. This means a lot of different plot aspects, which themselves aren’t so bad, but are at times a little murky (for instance, we don’t always know quite what’s up at the train station, at least on first watching); the Coens’ way of doing the robbery, I think, means a much more engaging, suspenseful set of plot stuff.

A key plot bit in the 1955 film, which the Coens opt not to include in their own, is that because Mrs. Wilberforce has been implicated in the crime by transporting the trunk at one point, the men, when she is onto them, use this fact as a way to try to (gently) blackmail her into doing what they want. This, of course, adds to some complexities of conscience (hero-like) for Mrs. W., though only for a short time.

Another part of the theft sequence in the 1955 film—which part I think is all of being clumsily staged, choppily edited, and not entirely necessary—is that Mrs. W. momentarily frustrates the crooks, who are (hidden from her) watching her progress transporting the trunk, when she stops to intervene in a situation where a street-side vendor is trying to shoo away a horse that has been eating the man’s vegetables that are his items for sale. This scene might have seemed promising and entertaining on paper—yes, it could work in some film—but here it’s clumsily enough rendered, and enough of a distraction from the larger story, that I feel it could have been left out. But then, as with other things with these films, maybe some diehard fans of the 1955 film would staunchly leave this sequence in.

The crooks’ comeuppance is more chaotic in the older film; the dumping-off-bridge nexus is different but emblematic for both films

Another major way the 1955 film is different from the 2004 is in the denouement, how the crooks get vanquished, in what turns out to be a way both comical and about as over-the-top as some of the earlier doings (i.e., the crooks end up getting maybe worse than they deserve), but is also rather scattered and wandering in structure.

The Coens straighten this situation out, and it also seems to go rather quickly, when the crooks—resolving to kill the old lady, which would seem the full fruition of what the story premises promised—first draw straws (this situation is pretty similar between the films), and then, one by one, they go to try killing the old woman, and each meets a bad end in an almost Rube Goldberg-mechanism–caused way. The professor, as it happens, gets “offed” in a way seemingly almost a ludicrous accident not dependent on his making a strong effort specifically to kill the old woman.

In the 1955 film, perhaps as appealed to viewers quite nicely in its day, the group starts to disintegrate as a group, and their efforts shift to one or another trying to get away by himself with the money, and/or (maybe with a welling-up of goodwill and good sense) shirk his “responsibility” to kill the old woman. And it isn’t that just one (or two) tries to kill one or more of the others, as is true of the 2004 film. Still, various men in the 1955 film die in ways that seem quite unexpected, but in keeping with the ludicrous potential of the comedy for this film.

##

The general idea of dumping bodies off a bridge—which has a memorable visual impact—is handled both similarly and differently between the films. The 2004 film has the crooks dump the bodies off a high, river-crossing bridge—a lot of this seems CGI’d, maybe built on some “root” footage taken of some real infrastructure—onto garbage barges that are patiently towed by tugboat underneath, and down what seems the Mississippi River to an island landfill project ahead near the horizon.

The Coens even, in their own script, rhetorically sketch a wider-cognizing set of premises for this, with the lively minister partway through the film including in his sermon references to, for the damned, a “garbage island” and scavenger birds feasting off their bodies, etc. This might be considered in line with the general-concept pessimism that seems to lace much of the Coens’ work, and leads some critics to call them “misanthropes” or the like (though, in a discussion that could be maybe done later on this or my other blog, the Coens could be considered an heir to Woody Allen in weaving delightful comedy with a sort of underlying philosophic pessimism, even though they don’t, probably, have a total lack of hope about Man/Woman and his/her ends).

In the 1955 film, the bridge-dumping situation is nicely specific and colorful (not in the sense of “bright colors” but in the sense of a rich array of details), and may be a good part of what roots this, for some viewers, as the “gold-standard film” for any “take” on a Ladykillers-type story. In an environment that seems classic coal-country England, Mrs. Wilberforce’s house, at the end of a dead-end street, backs up to a semi-undeveloped area of land that, with maybe a couple hundred feet between them, abuts a sort of bridge or trestle over a multi-track railway that runs under the bridge; the rail lines are very roughly parallel to the direction the house faces (which is away from the railway), with the bridge perpendicular to these lines. So if you went outside Mrs. W.’s back door, you would trundle down some declining, greenery-covered ground, walk among concrete structures of whatever sort, and come to the railing (or balustrade, or parapet) at the edge of the bridge. You could very easily, say, dump a dead body over the edge of this railing/parapet, let it fall into the cargo car of a passing train, and get an inconvenient result of your murderous deed nicely out of the way.

The setup is much dirtier in the 1955 film, one way being that the coal-burning trains, as they pass under the bridge, belch up a ton of smoke, which momentarily obscures the men who have been dumping off the body, the corpse feet-up in ludicrously comic style. (While the Coens’ situation is cleaner, it allows them more vivid, detailed images, and occasional Coens-style comedy involving details. For instance, when Garth Pancake’s and Mountain Girl’s bodies are dumped off the bridge, one after the other, they both seem to have remarkably hair legs, don’t they? At least the latter one does.)

In the 1955 film, the situation first seems echoed in the neater, every-crook-gets dumped situation of the 2004 film, where first the Major is dumped, and then Mr. Robinson (a wheelbarrow is used to carry each). The men turning on each other happens in a more messily complex way than in the Coens film; and in a 1955 bit quite unparalleled in the 2004 film, dopey “One-round” ends up in a situation where he has the other two crooks at bay near the bridge with a gun, with “Who looks stupid now?”…and a mad scramble ensues covered with train smoke….

The tail-end is remarkably similar in both films

I won’t reveal all the details of the remaining denouement, but suffice it to say it reaches its end in a more complex way than in the 2004 film (with Lom’s character and the professor dueling it out); and with the billowing of train smoke (and train-whistle hooting), and other haphazard ways the men deal with each other, sometimes the situation is murky and a bit confusing, not just because of the photography. There is something about this almost like a scrambling war/action film.

This flavor, when you consider the horror-film touches earlier in the film, show that in those days, there was no surefire recipe for making a black comedy; it borrowed from other genres, and maybe it was by sheer luck combined with a sort of creativity in making the film that what comes off is not an off-putting mishmash but a patchwork of borrowed tropes and tones that synthesize into a gritty forerunner of what would later be seamless standard fare (and easily pulled off, whatever the plot elements), black comedy with an edge to it.

##

The final scene in the 1955 film is almost copied very closely by the Coens. After the professor has been “offed” with an accidental clunk in the head, we quickly cut to Mrs. W. in the police station, where she tries to do her duty as a citizen to report on what she could of what happened with the bank robbers. The police, of course, already confirmedly skeptical about Mrs. W., respond as if she is just talking more fantasy, and when she asks what do they want her to do with the money, the policeman says she can keep it. Which surprises her, but which she assents to, reasoning (similar to the Coens’ version) that the stolen money only means “one farthing” is added to each of the insurance policies of the underwriters of the bank.

As she heads home, she hands a big-denomination bill to a panhandler, who is shocked at what he got.

Conclusion

The 1955 film is like an old photo album, some of it degraded and murky with age (with clumsy or low-budget production aspects, maybe OK for audiences in their day, looking more cloddish with time), but somehow conveying a bright new idea, a sort of cross between horror, crime drama, and sharp comedy, some of which (like a con-artist “professor” whose con isn’t as foolproof as he thinks) could still tickle audiences almost 50 years later when the Coens fashioned their own twist on it.

So like I said (as I spelled out carefully in Part 1), compare it with the 2004 version, and enjoy what works in both. To condemn the Coens’ version as if they defiled an old treasure is an off-base judgment.

Footnote 2 to Getting the Knack/OFAD 8

Yes, there actually was cause to do another footnote: Form 1095-B from the state creeps into my mail

I would not have expected to do a second footnote to my February 10 entry on this blog, but wonders never cease. Yesterday, February 11, I got in the mail no fewer than two statements (labeled as Form 1095-B) from the State of New Jersey which are rather like W-2s or 1099s, generally showing me information useful for, or necessary for, my filing my federal taxes. These particular forms testify to my having had Medicaid coverage, with X’s clunkily plopped into boxes on a sort of calendar showing which months I was covered.

Each of the two statements (which seem to be identical except in how my name is shown) represents a different set of months for 2015: one is from January to May, the other is from June through December. Why the two statements, instead of putting all the info on one, isn’t entirely clear, but one presumable reason is that I had a renewal, for which a form came to me in May (another possible reason is that their different handling of my name means they have two separate records on me, to whatever tax-related purpose).

There is nothing to indicate that my coverage was discontinued for about five weeks in July and early August, as was my belief for many months since then.

Since, when filing my 1040 this season, I filled out Form 8965, implying I did not have coverage part of the year, the astute observer might ask, have I misrepresented my health-insurance situation to the IRS? (It’s an implication of the ACA, potentially very disgusting depending on your politics, that this should even be an issue for the IRS.)

When I filled out my 1040 this year, signing it on February 8, and mailing it on February 9, my firm understanding is that I was not covered by Medicaid from late June through a date in early August. The two blog entries just prior to this one, as corrected and subject to possible future correction, support this. And I have paperwork and other records supporting my situation. No problem if I had to make a legal representation of myself.

Because my tax money amounts do not change with the change in understanding of my ACA status in 2015, I will not file a Form 1040X, which I’ve done (for other, legitimate reasons) in a few past years. If the IRS this year writes me saying “You represented that you had not been covered all year, but our records, from your state, show…,” I can represent that, with the 1040’s requiring you on signing to “declare” that to the best of your “information and belief,” the tax form is correct, it was indeed to the best of my information and belief that my ACA status was as I indicated in the form. If the state has sent me two Forms 1095-B as these are labeled, I did not expect these; I did not get such forms last year. I, of course, keep them in my records, against any future IRS developments.

##

What else could I affirm to the best of my information and belief? Well, let’s present this statement with a special scrubbing in order to have it be acceptable in a family-oriented context: “The **** State of New Jersey, specifically in its **** administration of Medicaid under the **** ACA expansion, is **** less-than-satisfactory, and makes me want to **** on its ****  ****.

“And if Chris Christie were to be asked, ‘Have you ever worked,’ as seems atypical for big-time attorneys, ‘for a trashy small business, to know how such places operate for better or worse?,’ he could answer, possibly to the best of his information and belief, ‘Yes, I have worked for such a business, and it was the **** State of New Jersey.’”

Footnote to Getting the Knack/OFAD 8

Did you think I was being silly fearing an expense not covered by my Medicaid?

It’s convenient to me to offer these notes in a separate entry, rather than insert them as special notes into the previous blog entry.

This relates to the parenthetical part near the end of the previous entry, when I said “Add to this the fact that I don’t really trust this [Medicaid] insurance, enough to get any service beyond the minimum I’ve usually gotten (because what if I went for, say, a heart stress test, and then found I was being billed directly for some aspect of it for which the service-provider wouldn’t take Medicaid?)….”  

What I was thinking about were, implicitly or not, a few things.

First, my GP doctor I’ve seen for years, whom I generally find satisfactory, recently has suggested a colonoscopy (by an outside doctor), over a number of visits. He has twice recommended X doctor in the county (a foreign name; I don’t remember it now), but said I should check to see if that doctor takes Medicaid. (This point said at two different times.)

Which, to me, was one good reason, among several, not to have a colonoscopy done in the near future. (A) Colon cancer, to my knowledge, doesn’t run in my family (ancestors and other blood relatives). (B) I have never had general anesthesia, and am not quick to try it in the near future. (C) There is the possibility, however slim, I might get billed in part for the procedure. ([D] There are reports in the media that colonoscopies are, in some cases [where the risk of a real health problem is low], nothing so much as a big money-maker for the relevant providers U.S. health-care system.) 

Bottom line: I am in no rush to get a colonoscopy done.

The second good cause for concern, and the more colorful one, is this: In the 14+ years of my mother’s cancer treatments and periodic follow-ups (scans), etc., way back in the 2001-02 period, when she was first getting treated, there was an instance where, after I forget which set of therapy (over months, she had all of several chemo treatments, a five-week period of radiation, and eventual surgery; but in this case it may have been after one of her rounds of chemo), she had to get and use some—I forget the medicine’s name, but it was a new thing for boosting white blood cell count. According to her very cordial chemo oncologist, the hospital (UMDNJ, as it was called at the time) had paid for this med in individual patients’ cases in the past, but at the moment it couldn’t cover the cost, and I think Medicare wouldn’t cover it, so my mother had to pay for it.

The cost for a bundled set of several shots of the med was over $1,000. I’ve had a memory it was between $1,000 and $2,000, but my mother has remembered it as $3,000-and-something, and she is probably right. Anyway, her credit card (Visa, I think) wouldn’t accept the charge—her card had a limit on the size of charges, or something like that. So, with ad hoc decision-making in motion, I used my American Express card to pay for it (I’d had an Amex card since 1984), and she eventually paid me back (by check, maybe), to cover the charge to my card.

Today, for my own health needs (which have had considerably less medical attention than my mother has received for hers), I could not afford to pay thousands for a sudden unexpected medical expense that is not covered by my Medicaid, i.e., to pay via credit/debit card or any other way.

Hopefully, if I get profoundly sick where I might need to pay such charges, I either by wonderful luck am living permanently in Canada, or I die quickly.

That’s where we stand with the U.S. health-care system.

##

Yes, this entry could have had the banner:

Also fits this series: Medical Waste: An occasional series on the absurdity to be found in the U.S. health-care system

Getting the Knack/Only in NJ, and OFAD 8: A yearly review of eligibility for Medicaid benefits runs into initial ludicrous errors, then…after much ado, leaves me OK at tax time

I originally drafted a version of this entry back in the summer (of 2015), and I had the added subheads as follows:

Also fits this series: Medical Waste: An occasional series on the absurdity to be found in the U.S. health-care system

Also somewhat fits this series [assuming there was other content unspecific to the health-care practical mess I had to describe]: Off the Scales: A comment series on excesses in the U.S. legal profession

But I lost steam (mostly by my discretion) for doing the entry, though a chunky draft was made. As one reason for holding off, I thought I would wait to see what I would do (regarding the specific procedural mess that prompted the entry) at tax time, early this 2016. Turns out, the tax issue was pretty simple, and was as I pretty much expected it would and should be.

Subsections below:

Reapplication comes, innocently enough; bureaucratic bungling ensues

The illusion about my being “head of the household”

The mess involving reapplication, due to the Medicaid office’s crazily slow handling of incoming mail

Left in vexation and a sort of procedural limbo in the summer

Now, what about tax-filing time?

[Edit 2/11/16. Edits 2/12/16.]

Reapplication comes, innocently enough; bureaucratic bungling ensues

The way the mess started is that, in spring 2015, per the perfectly normal and to-be-expected situation of the state Medicaid office needing to review your case and having you fill out an application again to see if you still qualify for Medicaid, I got a reapplication mailing from the Medicaid office in about early May 2015 (as with so much else in this mess, there were delays: the first renewal letter was postmarked May 5, and received May 7; a later letter said the first letter was sent “April 30”).

I didn’t wait too long to fill the application out; I took a few weeks to do so, and had to get information from my mother, in whose house I live, to include in the application, among information routinely requested on people in your household.

The second of two problems is what is of more importance here. But the first one I will spell out in some detail, for your full appreciation of how the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care act has been fumbled with in New Jersey.  

The illusion about my being “head of the household.” Incidentally, the form I got, which had some info about me preprinted, was presented in such a way that I was referred to as the “head” of the household. This is because of a standard, characteristic heuristic of NJ FamilyCare—the more special-focus-oriented office in New Jersey that handles all Medicaid applications in the state (which, I think, was originally for ordinary Medicaid recipients before the Affordable Care Act was implemented; then, in early 2014, it started clumsily including applicants under the ACA “Medicaid expansion”). This heuristic matter meant that anyone in the state who applies for Medicaid, according to their old (pre-ACA) system, was the head of a household, often with children.

So much for adjusting their forms, as late as 2015, to reality under what should have been implied by the ACA expansion. Of course, the ACA, in its Medicaid expansion component, made it possible for those eligible for Medicaid to be other than single parents with children at home (which is also the sort of criterion that has defined the more parsimonious forms of welfare in the country). I was among these without-children people (and as it happens, my mother doesn’t get Medicaid—she is retired and on Medicare—while I am not on disability and I, not she, earn money from work: I am among the working poor, as being an editor in New Jersey can easily make you).

My entering into the Medicaid system followed exactly what I was federally required to do: originally, in late 2013, I had filled out the form on the federal “Marketplace” Web site, and I qualified for Medicaid in early 2014. The info I had entered was sent by the federal “Marketplace” office to, I’m speculating, the New Jersey state offices of Medicaid (in 2015 I was in touch with what implies that there is a more bureaucratic, central office for this than the NJ FamilyCare office). (Of course, in 2014, bureaucratic bungling, mostly on the New Jersey end, started very soon; although the NJ FamilyCare office or the state’s main Medicaid office supposedly sent me a Medicaid card in about March 2014, they had the wrong mailing address for me, though I’d provided the right one on the federal Web site. So I didn’t finally get all my signing up done until November-December 2014.)

Also, as I’ve talked about in entries in early 2014, New Jersey’s NJ FamilyCare office (and maybe also, in the same period, the more central Medicaid office, though I don’t have firsthand knowledge of this) was hugely backlogged and ill-equipped to deal with the new influx of Medicaid applications through the Obamacare enrollment. (This I addressed deep in this entry, especially the end note [where a news article is cited], in my series on signing up for Obamacare.)

Anyway, on the reapplication form in spring 2015, I hand-wrote a footnote explaining that, while I was labeled as the head of the household, I was not really; I added that my mother was, but I was the one who applied for Medicaid. Well, this specific bit turned out not to be an issue down the road. With me, NJ FamilyCare didn’t have a hard time digesting this inability to square with their own form-bound presumptions about who applied for Medicaid.

And it was the least of the problems.

The mess involving reapplication, due to the Medicaid office’s crazily slow handling of incoming mail. The initial big problem was that, after I mailed off the reapplication form plus a copy of my 2014 federal tax form to NJ FamilyCare, in its own return, postage-paid envelope, about 12 days before the deadline, I got a letter from them dated June 5, 2015—five days before my deadline—saying I was “disenrolled” from Medicaid because (they claimed) I hadn’t reapplied by the deadline, which was five days after the date of their disenrollment letter, June 10. I received this “disenrollment” letter June 11.

(Adding to all the bureaucratic messiness is that I had mailed my reapplication Friday, May 29; the deadline, as I said, was June 10. But NJ FamilyCare sent a “final reminder” letter dated May 29, postmarked June 2, which I received June 4. So their disenrollment letter was dated seven days after the writing of their “final reminder,” while my deadline was 12 days after the writing of the “final reminder.”)

On June 11, I called NJ FamilyCare right away. I ended up finding that they had my reapplication; they had received it, according to the person I spoke to, that day, June 11. My obvious question: HOW COULD IT TAKE A REAPPLICATION, MAILED TO THEIR OWN ADDRESS, VIA THEIR OWN POSTAGE-PAID ENVELOPE, 12 DAYS TO GET INTO THEIR HANDS?

Left in vexation and a sort of procedural limbo in the summer

The “disenrollment” letter, in legally required style, explained how I could appeal by X date, etc. For some days or weeks, I debated on whether to appeal, for what legal rights it could respect for me, even though it seemed the Medicaid office was processing my reapplication; but there was an air, I felt, that I was not in a normal reapplication process. This was bolstered when, adding to the grim comedy, a letter arrived from them June 17, postmarked June 15, and dated June 11, saying thanks for my interest; they had received my application and were reviewing it; they would be in touch if they needed more info.

Anyway, I ended up choosing not to appeal (and this was not a totally easy bit of deliberation). And on their end, though I wasn’t 100 percent sure, it seemed they were disregarding the disenrollment issue, while now my reapplication was “pending.”

And indeed I was told it was “pending” when, for a coincidental standing appointment, I visited my doctor on June 16, and his workers checked into the matter, apparently with the Medicaid office directly.

But by July 4, I figured I had been without Medicaid insurance for almost a month [adjustment 2/12/16: this isn't quite true; the effective date for coverage stopping was June 30, according to the state's letter; and see update added below]. And I didn’t know how long it would be when I am covered again, or whether I even would be covered. [In general, true later in the summer.]

I seem to recall that, sometime in the period of my application’s being pending, they also wrote me asking for more info to be sent, and I did this, this time sending back the answer by Priority Mail, which should have reached them after no more than two days. I think there was a phone call where I heard from them they hadn’t received my additional info yet, and this was several days, maybe a week, after I’d sent it. Who, or what, was manning their mailroom? Snails?

Meanwhile, in July, I paid the doctor appointment of June 16 out of my pocket, explaining to them that with the Medicaid approval not being certain, and since I didn’t want the unpaid doctor bill hanging over my head, I wanted to pay them (as I had routinely done for years anyway, before I was ever enrolled in Medicaid) and get it out of the way.

In about late July, I got a notice from the state Medicaid office saying I was approved for continued enrollment, and my insurance would officially restart in very early August. So by what this verbally implied, I was supposedly without Medicaid coverage almost two months.

##

A few months later—this was probably September 2015—I asked the doctor’s office for some kind of receipt or such reflecting that the [important correction of month] June appointment had been paid; or maybe I asked something about my Medicaid coverage. (I probably have records on the precise query, but it isn’t important now.) I was told by them that Medicaid had paid for the June visit. I was surprised, of course; Medicaid had paid when I was supposedly disenrolled at the time?

I asked for the money back that I’d paid the doc’s office in July, and they did some research, and found that, yes, I had paid when it turned out I needn’t have, and they gave me a check for the money back.

Now, what about tax-filing time?

So my next question was, what would I do at income-tax (1040) time? There is a form (8965) you fill out if you have not had health insurance coverage, per the ACA. Last tax year (2014), following this form’s instructions, I got a hardship exemption from paying a penalty. What about this year?

The problem was, the state had said in 2015 I was disenrolled for about two months [update 2/12/16: the state's early-June letter said the effective date of disenrollment was June 30, so technically my June visit to the doctor would have been covered; but I've always intuitively remembered the discontinuation of the coverage as from the time I got the letter, in early June; see also second footnote to this entry, in the February 12 entry], but the doctor had been paid by the insurer for my July visit anyway. Would I represent to the IRS I had had coverage from early June to early August, or not?

It turns out, I qualified for a hardship exemption again, so the “enrolled or not” issue wasn’t necessary to represent in Form 8965.

##

Add to this the fact that I don’t really trust this insurance, enough to get any service beyond the minimum I’ve usually gotten (because what if I went for, say, a heart stress test, and then found I was being billed directly for some aspect of it for which the service-provider wouldn’t take Medicaid?), and sometimes I feel it would be a lot easier not to have the insurance.

(Plus, the insurer UnitedHealthcare—which handles my Medicaid insurance, and which normally is as trustworthy as any U.S. health insurer—has spoken as if it might leave the ACA insurance market in 2017, though I don’t know if that means both the individual-insurance market and Medicaid, or just one or the other. Who knows what I would find it suitable to do if I no longer had them for Medicaid insurance.)

Also, having Medicaid means I don’t have medical expenses by which to get a deduction on my New Jersey state income tax, but that’s another story, and not a big deal.

##

Here is the last in the OFAD series, which series tailed off in 2014:

OFAD 7: Connecting with Lefty: Finally getting my Medicaid card, to square with the ACA demand

URL:

http://gregoryludwig.blogspot.com/2014/11/ofad-7-connecting-with-lefty-finally.html