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Workplace issues

A$king and re¢eiving

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“A$k and ye shall re¢eive” is the motto of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, to which I used to belong until I figured out that freelance writing is a losing proposition. ASJA put me on to the fact that publishers don’t pay a fair rate for work done; they pay what they know they can get away with. They bank on the tendency of writers to work in their own little garrets, to cultivate social lives best described as null and void, and to be way too shy to ask other writers how much they earn. Magazine publishers in particular will pay one writer, say, $1.00 a word and another 50¢ or 75¢ for the same kind of work of the same quality. They recognize that some wannabe writers are so anxious to see their bylines in print they not only would work for free, they’d pay the magazine to publish them, and so the magazine plays that for all it’s worth. Which is plenty.

Entertainingly, today I learned that book publishers will do something similar when they outsource editorial work. My young business partner (late one of my research assistants) and I have been proofreading detective novels for a company that publishes nothing but mystery fiction. Because the work is easy and the copy so entertaining it’s hard to believe anyone would pay you to read it, we’ve been accepting the publisher’s offered rate of $12 an hour.

In response to our talking up our new enterprise, The Copyeditor’s Desk,a book packaging company e-mailed me and asked our rates for proofreading. Without thinking about the mystery publisher, I gave her a rate on the very lowest end of what I actually expect to earn: $25 an hour. Proofreading does not rise to the level of rocket science, and so I couldn’t reasonably ask for the amount I try to get by manipulating my copyediting page rate to fit the difficulty of the copy: $60 an hour. But on the other hand, there comes a point where you can’t just give it away. I figured $25 would be a bit rich for her blood.

To my astonishment, she wrote back and said our proposed rate was in the range of what they’ve been paying others.

Whoa! You are paying proofreaders twenty-five bucks an hour? You’re paying more than twice what we’ve been earning reading mystery novels? Are we talkin’ the same people who have the skills you could have expected from a bright high-school graduate a quarter-century ago?

Huh. Wonder what they would have paid if I’d suggested their arcane interior decorating books need a proofreader with a Ph.D. to make them right. . .

So the message is this: Don’t be shy about asking what you think your time is worth. If you don’t get it, maybe it’s for the best: the next client or employer will come up to your standards. And find out, even if it means bald-facedly asking colleagues what they earn, how much others in your trade or profession are earning for similar work.
Ignoran¢e is not bli$$.

Health insurance flap settles down

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Our Beloved Employer’s announcement that its only health insurance plan to cover the Mayo has been discontinued caused some annoyance among a number of employees. As it developed, I was not alone.

The HR website gave no clue as to what plans we will have for the open enrollment that starts today. One page says something about Aetna, but another page — dated 2007 — makes no mention of an Aetna plan. If you call on the phone or e-mail, they won’t tell you anything. Instead, they instruct you to attend one of the “benefits fairs” slated for this month.

So I trudged across campus to today’s “fair,” hoping to pick up some paperwork that will compare plans and maybe even say what hospitals are covered. No such luck: the two-hour “fair” amounted to an endless PowerPoint presentation! Attendance was standing-room only.

Oh, lord. So I sat on the floor, having run a little late because my car’s battery went dead and it took an hour or two for my mechanic to come up to my house, jump-start the chariot, and then follow me to his shop and change the battery and fix the fuses that blew in the process. Mercifully, the HR “presenter” paused as she cast up a slide listing the prices of the various plans, just long enough for me to raise my (literally) sweaty little paw and ask if any of them covered the Mayo. Yes, she said: RAN-AMN, an EPO with a monthly premium of $30.

Hot dang! I couldn’t believe it. The plan that worked was a sister EPO — our 2007-08 premiums have been about $25. I picked the now-defunct Schaller-Anderson plan because HR told me it was the only plan that covered the Mayo. So this means either they misinformed me last year or RAN-AMN has picked up the Mayo as a network member.

I’d figured I was going to have to go with the PPO, whose rates are around $200 a month for a single person, or try to get a bare-bones high-deductible plan and go with a doctor in a boutique practice, by way of getting access to medical care…something that’s in short supply around here. Having learned to take what HR says with a crystal of sea salt, I called the Mayo’s billing department and learned that yea verily, they are part of RAN-AMN’s network.

So that’s a relief. If I’d had to go back to the PPO, it would have meant the end of my plan to save enough to pay off the Renovation Loan, since the monthly setaside for that is almost exactly the same as the PPO’s premium.

Interestingly, deep in RAN-AMN’s fine-print paperwork, I found a proviso saying that if you are eligible for Medicare (not if you have it, but if you’re eligible), then the insurance you’re buying through GDU becomes “secondary.” This implies that you can NOT opt out of Medicare just because you have a job that offers comparable but cheaper coverage.

It looks to me like Medicare is going to be an expensive proposition. Everyone gets Medicare Part A, “free” for 40 years of payroll deductions. But it doesn’t cover much and leaves you open to bankruptcy should you develop an expensive ailment. So you have to take Medicare Part B, which costs almost $100 a month. Then you also have to take Medicare Part D — if you decline it and then later pick it up, you have to pay an extra premium (a de facto fine), for the rest of your life. Medicare D costs around $30 a month, and rising. But Medicare A, B, and D still don’t cover you well adequately, because Medicare has become so chintzy that more and more doctors won’t accept “assignment” — that is, they won’t work for what Medicare pays. So, to guarantee you can see the doctor of your choice or a competent specialist, you also must buy “supplemental” or “Medigap” insurance, which apparently costs upwards of $145.

So you have to cobble together four different plans to get full coverage, and by the time you’ve done that, the cost of health insurance for a retiree will exceed $250 a month. I would find that a strain on the decent salary I’m earning. To have to pay eight or nine times my present healthcare premiums for Medicare when I’m living on a reduced, fixed income will pose an interesting challenge.

As you can imagine, any Pushmi-Pullu as jury-rigged is this is complicated and confusing. The government’s official Medigap document linked above is 52 pages long, and following it requires your full, undivided attention. Then we have this overview of Medicare, 113 pages full of details whose complexity rivals the U.S. tax code!

Look, I’m grateful not to have to pay the exorbitant rates with which insurance companies gouge older Americans — $400, $500, $600 a month. But still…I’m brought back to the same thought that always occurs to me every time I have to look into our health-care system:
There’s no excuse for this.

Insurance: Never a dull moment

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Just got a notice from the Great Desert University that my health insurance plan–the only one that covers my doctor–will be dropped this August. Thank you so much, beloved employer.

Well, I knew it was too good to last. After a long series of health insurance fiascos (including one year when the only provider they offered was so awful that none of my doctors would accept it-one doctor refused to see me at all, even after I offered to pay him out of pocket), the state started self-insuring a couple of years ago. They’ve had an EPO plan run by Schaller-Anderson, which, incredibly, covered all my doctors, including the Mayo Clinic, for a monthly premium of $24. This was a huge improvement over the $220 I was paying for the PPO, which sorta allowed you to go to your choice of doctors but two years ago quit covering the Mayo.

When Aetna acquired Schaller-Anderson a few months back, I thought “Okay…say goodbye to that!” Right on.

So now I’ll either have to find another doctor (which I do not want to do) or once again buy incredibly pricey insurance on the open market. The last time I bought my own insurance, I ended up with an MSA (medical savings account) plan. Though it offered total flexibility and generous coverage, it was very expensive–premiums were about $250 a month, and you had to deposit $1500 a year to a savings account with piratical fees. It’s probably moot, though. At this point in my life, I’d be surprised if I could get health insurance outside a group plan at all.

Other than the Mayo, healthcare providers in this state leave a lot to be desired. When I had acute appendicitis, I almost died while sitting fruitlessly in the waiting room of a much-touted major regional medical center. After sitting there over four hours in exquisite agony without even so much as a triage, I left and got some friends to drive me to the Mayo Clinic’s ER-the EMTs would not take me there, even though it’s no further from my home than the Third-World hospital that offered no medical care. By then the infection was very advanced and my appendix was about to burst. The Mayo’s physicians performed emergency surgery, and the care I received was excellent from beginning to end. And “end” could have been the operative word: for older adults, a burst appendix is a life-threatening event with a much higher mortality rate than for younger victims.

I want my choice of doctors, and I want to be able to see the doctor I’ve been seeing for the past 40 years, who happens to practice at the Mayo. When HMOs first started to take over the healthcare industry in this country, he saw the proverbial handwriting on the wall. Coincidentally, the Mayo opened its Scottsdale clinic about then. He had been trained at the Mayo, and as soon as he could he rejoined that organization. It’s a hellacious long drive for me to get to his office (the hospital is much closer), but I must say that the care I’ve received by and large has been worth it.

he state, of course, would like to herd us all into HMOs. I will pay out of pocket before I go into one of those things.

My mother died hideously in the “care” (a term best used ironically) of the first HMO organized in Arizona. As it developed, the doctors had a financial interest in the operation: if it made money, so did they; if it lost money, they lost money. So, it ran powerfully contrary to their personal interest to diagnose a patient with an expensive terminal illness. They simply refused to admit the obvious–that she had cancer. And it was so obvious, my cat could have diagnosed it. But the problem was, if they allowed that she had cancer, they would have had to treat her, and that would have cost the HMO a ton of money. So they denied she was sick at all-the day before they were forced by my father’s demands and the implicit threat of a lawsuit to open her up for an exploratory, her doctor told me and my father that that my eminently sane and practical mother needed a psychiatrist. When he did find her (predictably) full of cancer, he dropped her cold. They stopped providing doctors to see her or to advise my father and me on her care. I had to openly threaten them with my lawyers–repeatedly!–to get even the most basic nursing care for her.

She would have died anyway, but she didn’t have to suffer the way she did. Thirty years ago, there wasn’t much they could do for cancer, but they did have pain-killers. Even had they refused to treat her, they could at least have given her morphine, so she didn’t lie in bed suffering the tortures of the damned through the last weeks and months of her life.

After that and some other amazing experiences in the American healthcare system, I’m very picky about the kind of insurance coverage I get. I’m willing to pay to the max to get coverage that will allow me to go to any doctor I choose and that will pick up the tab for the astronomical bills presented by the kinds of illnesses one is prone to later in life.

So, this time around I’m going to look at concierge practices, where you pay a fee upfront in exchange for getting a doctor’s attention. In theory, you can get appointments promptly and the doctor schedules more than 10 or 15 minutes to talk to you. You still have to keep your insurance, but you might be able to get a lower-cost plan or even just a major medical plan. The annual fee is usually around $1,500…but that’s a far cry from the $2,640 a year I was paying for the PPO that canceled my doctor.

There are a number of drawbacks to concierge medicine, one of which is the obvious social issue: it pushes the practice of medicine even further toward elitism. The rich get care; the rest of us take what we can scrounge up, which often ain’t much. In my part of the country, precious few doctors subscribe to this system, and it’s hard to know what their qualifications might be. Or disqualifications. In the MDVIP network, for example, most of the physician members in my area practice at John C. Lincoln hospital, a scary affair whose Dickensian ER is…well, overworked, shall we say. That’s where a doctor decided, after a cursory exam and no tests, that the appendicitis just starting to make itself known must be inflammatory bowel syndrome and prescribed a drug whose manufacturer’s label said, loud and clear, that it was contraindicated for women with my symptoms. I can hardly wait to go back there!

Do I demand “Cadillac care”? You bet. It’s my life and my health we’re talking about here. And in America today, “competent” care is defined as “Cadillac care.”

By and large the offerings are abysmal. In Arizona, for example, only one hospital has been rated by HealthGrades as truly excellent: the Mayo. John and Cindy McCain go to the Mayo. You and I don’t, because our insurance won’t cover it. Three hospitals were rated as “distinguished” (a cut below “excellent”) for their clinical practice: the Mayo, Scottsdale Healthcare-Osborn, and Del E. Webb in Sun City. Only one of those is even remotely within driving distance of the central part of the city, where I live. In the entire state, just three landed “distinguished” ratings for patient safety: the Mayo, Yavapai Regional Medical Center in Prescott, and Yuma Regional Medical Center.

I guess I could get bare-bones major medical coverage and then pay my doctor at the Mayo out of pocket. In only two years I’ll be eligible for Medicare, which does cover the Mayo. If I raid my savings and pay off the Renovation Loan now-meaning I won’t be buying a car anytime in the near future-I could take the $220 a month I would be paying for the PPO and set it aside to pay medical bills. It’s awfully risky, though…all it would take is a heart attack or a tumor to bankrupt me once and for all.

I also could sign up for the flex plan, which in the past has been a bit of a waste. I sure do hate to cut my take-home pay drastically, given that it provides me a grand $29 of play in my budget. Contrary to claims, I’ve never found the flex plan did a thing to save on income taxes; every time I’ve subscribed, it just meant cash gouged out of take-home pay that I was forced to spend on medical stuff whether I needed it or not. This has led to many unnecessary doctor’s visits and purchases of redundant pairs of glasses.

I’m thankful that I can afford to pony up $1,500 for access to a doctor, if indeed I decide to do so. But…am I the only person who thinks that this is a damned ridiculous pass for the alleged greatest nation on earth? If America is so great, how come we can’t provide decent health care for all our citizens, at an affordable price?

1 comment left on iWeb site

TM

I agree. My father has recently had some major health problems and was transfered from a Mesa hospital to Scottsdale-Osborn, one on the “distinguished” list. He had to remain in the hospital for 10 days and the discrepancy in care was startling. Even the food in Scottsdale was better. In our society, unfortunately, the almighty dollar rules all…even for products and services such as healthcare.

Good ole boys

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Yesterday The New York Times ran a front-page feature highlighting one of Our Beloved City’s most intractable foibles: raw sexism. The Phoenix Country Club, we are told, persists in its immemorial custom of barring women from the part of the institution where business is conducted.

A Little History

The Phoenix Country Club was for many years the only golf course in the city and the only exclusive club for the elite. The city was run by this elite, which for some time called itself the Phoenix Forty. Any business that got done was done by or through the Phoenix Forty. Over time, of course, the Forty expanded; it established Valley Forward, an ancillary group designed to mentor and bring up a new generation of city fathers, and COMPAS, an arts group founded to irrigate a very arid cultural desert. Anyone who was anyone-that is, anyone who wanted to make money in business or the professions-had to do business with these men.

And a Little Today

Such business generally took place in an informal setting, often on the golf course and often at a small watering hole inside the Phoenix Country Club called the Men’s Grill. If you had the right connections and the right anatomical equipment, you, too, could do business in one the most wildly booming cities in the nation. But only if you had the key to the executive washroom.

These facts still hold true, even though the city now has more than one stupidly expensive private club and more golf courses per capita than anyplace in the world. The real business of this city takes place at the Phoenix Country Club. And no girls are allowed.

That’s right. Women are not permitted to set a dainty little foot inside the Men’s Grill, despite years of campaigning to make ambition an equal-opportunity enterprise.

Why Does It Matter

Understand: business does not take place in the PCC’s dining room, a white-linen-tablecloth establishment that, last time I was there, remained as untouched by the concept of “cuisine” as the rest of the place was by the concept of equitable treatment. Food was plain and dreary, service was just OK, and the place still isn’t open for afternoon drinks. There was a dank little hole in the basement where girls could gather, and I have been there to meet with budding groups of would-be female movers and shakers. But no one in power ever stuck his nose in that room, and so little ever came of those groups. That is because the adage about selecting a mentor is true: you don’t want a mentor who is like you; you want a mentor who is in power. For this reason, business and professional women in my generation sought out established men as mentors, not other striving women.

Historically, women have not been the only target of discrimination at the Phoenix Country Club. To this day, it’s a rare dusky face you’ll see in those precincts. And when I was young, Jews were strictly verboten. In the mid-1960s-that’s how late this was happening-a friend whose parents had a membership used to invite our Jewish pal to spend days at the pool, as much as a gesture of rebellion as of friendship. Not until years later were the strictures against Jews and blacks lifted.

Those against women, however, have never been removed. If I wished to associate with the Phoenix Country Club set-and were I in business or politics I would have to-I could pay many thousands of dollars a year to buy and maintain a membership, but I would not be permitted to enter the locus of power. When men walked on the moon for the first time, women members were not allowed into this site or into a similar den at the Arizona Club to watch the historic event on the clubs’ television sets.

When people have objected to these policies, the elite members have shown themselves to be exactly the kind of pigs one would expect. Proving that boys will always be boys, they went after one member who challenged their habits, Logan Van Sittert, and “hooted and hollered at him and called his wife a whore.” Women who have protested the blatant discrimination have seen their names and telephone numbers listed on a Web site titled “Femi Nazis here in Phoenix.” One recalcitrant member, who owns one of the stunningly expensive historic homes on the golf course, looked up to find club members “hopping off their carts” to pee on her pecan tree.

Why, one asks, would anyone want to have anything to do with such morons? Because these morons run the city and to a large extent they run the state. You obtain Power (and the money that comes with it) by rubbing shoulders with Power: part of building a heavy-hitting career in this state is seeing and being seen by the people who are already in power.

And Why We Should Never Forget…

This “custom” is a vestige of a time when women, blacks, Latinos, and Jews were barred from full citizenship in our country. Today we tend to forget the fact that equal access to business, the professions, and the seats of power is a very recent phenomenon. And it is something that should not be forgotten.

Young women in particular need to bear in mind just how new and how precarious their rights as full, adult human beings really are. Let us remember that the the movers and shakers behind the political party currently in power desire, with all their hearts and allegedly religious souls, to limit all women’s right to decide what to do with their bodies-part and parcel of the control that until recently barred women from unfettered participation in business, the professions, and politics.

To insist that all Americans have full access to America’s opportunities and be free to enjoy them to the extent of their abilities is not “feminazism.” It’s common decency.

The joy of megacorporations

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Months have gone by, and I’m still trying to extract statements from TIAA-CREF and Fidelity for my retirement plan. I can’t access their websites because neither outfit has given me a PIN or a password. The most recent statements arrived in spring of 2007.

After trying to call and being repelled by impenetrable telephone run-around mazes at both entities, I sent them snail-mail requests in March. Nothing. Then I sent e-mail requests through their “Contact” links at their websites. Not a word from Fidelity. I complained to HR through PeopleSoft’s new impenetrable “please do not bother us” electronic maze. Nothing.

TIAA-CREF did manage to respond to the e-mail request, addressed to “Dr. Hay” as follows (in ordinary correspondence, I never append “Ph.D.” to my name):

We will be happy to answer your account specific questions, however, I am unable to provide this information via email as your email was sent non-secure. Emails sent non-secure are for general inquiries only. This measure is in place to protect your personal information and privacy, which we take very seriously.
Because you are not able to log into your accounts, you may obtain the information by calling our National Contact Center at the telephone number listed below.

Foolishly, the person who sent this did so from an e-mail address that would accept a response. Hence, me to Faceless Corporation:

It is not possible to get through to a human being on these telephone numbers. I have tried. Please give me a phone number that will reach a person. If you can’t do that, please provide a way to communicate over a secure e-mail connection.

Clearly, if you know I have a Ph.D., something that was not mentioned in my e-mail, you know who I am and you know how to access my account. Why, then, is it not possible simply to send me a statement at the address your organization has?

This elicited a message from a new person at TIAA-CREF, who introduced herself as my “case manager” and said,

Iam researching this matter and will reply to you in writing as soon as possible within the next 30 days. I will contact you if we require additional time or need further information.

Think of that: 30 days to figure out how to send a statement. How hard can this be?

As we know, bureaucracy exists to serve itself. Apparently there’s a corollary to that famous law of nature: the larger the bureaucracy, the less effectively it can serve itself or anyone else.

LOL! Yes, I do know about gethuman.com. At this point, I just wanna see what happens next!

Side jobs, side worries

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Tomorrow I’m meeting with the editor of a small local press about a freelance job. It’s low-paid, but one of my RAs is freelancing for this outfit and says the work is steady.

For the time being, I don’t need much pay. The amount I’d make in a year would be about 1.5 times the amount I’d earn teaching one course, and the work is a lot easier and a lot less annoying. Two gigs of this nature would out-earn the equivalent of teaching a course a semester, a reasonable load in addition to a full-time job.

I also hope to let her know I’m open for other work and may soon be in the market for a full-time job.

My boss has had my annual review materials for three weeks. All I’ve heard from her is silence.

Meanwhile, today the legislature is expected to cut the Great Desert University’s budget by $50.4 million. My college alone is millions of dollars in the hole, far deeper in the red than at any time in the university’s history. And my job? By no stretch of the imagination can it be seen as “essential.” It supports the university’s mission, but only if you understand that a university has a mission to do research and scholarship as well as to teach. And our state’s legislators and regents never have fully grasped that point.

So I worry: Is the dean silent because she’s waiting to see if my contract will be among those to be canceled? Is she already mulling over ways to show me the door?

This is a recurring worry for me, since I work on a year-to-year contract that can be canceled at will. Under normal circumstances, it’s not much of a worry, because of institutional inertia: replacing me would be a hassle, and so it would take quite a dramatic circumstance to move the administration to do that. However, in the face of gigantic budget cuts, another possibility arises: get rid of me and all my staff. Closing down my entire office would not be a hassle. My RAs’ contracts end at the semester and mine ends on June 30. To get rid of us all, the university simply has to let our contracts lapse.

That strikes me as not unlikely. Experience has shown that silence from the dean’s quarters is often a bad sign.

So it behooves me to start looking around for other work, even it it’s just freelance stuff.

It has to be possible to get by on the reduced collect-at-age-62 Social Security and the proceeds from my retirement savings. My income would drop from $61,000 to $37,760, of which $12,000 has to go to pay the mortgage on the Investment House. I can’t even begin to imagine how I would live on $25,760-pretax! With no health insurance! Health insurance alone, through ASU’s retiree system, would consume another $7,200. How on earth would I eat, to say nothing of support a house?

Be This Way describes how she and her husband arranged to make it possible for her to knock off work. On the other hand: she has a spouse who’s earning a living. I have no one. And SDXB has been insisting for years that Bumhood is feasible for anyone who’s determined to make it work. But: he has a military pension and gets twice as much SS as I will get, on top of his savings. He lives in Sun City, where housing costs are a fraction of mine, taxes are a third as much as mine, and insurance is half of mine. And his idea of “normal” is most people’s idea of “ascetic”—he lives an Extreme Frugal lifestyle as a matter of course.

I don’t want to live like that, and I don’t want to live in Sun City. But if I lose my job, that’s pretty much how it’ll have to be.

Comments from the iWeb site:

1 Comment

BeThisWay

This is very stressful stuff.You’re right in that my situation is very different, and I’m lucky that we have no debt besides my small (under $600 a month) mortgage.

I don’teven knoe you but I have every confidence that IF they close tyour department or don’t renew your contract that you will manage.You’re capable and not afraid to work, and work hard.

Keep us posted!