Thoughts provoked by an old house in need of renovation, its garden, a marriage lived within its walls, and of a retired Thoroughbred race horse named Fibs and Flannel.
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
II
Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars. The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars Ascend to summer in the tree We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before But reconciled among the stars.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. The inner freedom from the practical desire, The release from action and suffering, release from the inner And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving, Erhebung without motion, concentration Without elimination, both a new world And the old made explicit, understood In the completion of its partial ecstasy, The resolution of its partial horror. Yet the enchainment of past and future Woven in the weakness of the changing body, Protects mankind from heaven and damnation Which flesh cannot endure. Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered.
III
Here is a place of disaffection Time before and time after In a dim light: neither daylight Investing form with lucid stillness Turning shadow into transient beauty With slow rotation suggesting permanence Nor darkness to purify the soul Emptying the sensual with deprivation Cleansing affection from the temporal. Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time, Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs Time before and time after. Eructation of unhealthy souls Into the faded air, the torpid Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London, Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney, Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Descend lower, descend only Into the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; This is the one way, and the other Is the same, not in movement But abstention from movement; while the world moves In appetency, on its metalled ways Of time past and time future.
IV
Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling?
Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.
V
Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now. Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them. The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
The detail of the pattern is movement, As in the figure of the ten stairs. Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.
So maybe it's not true that nothing happens in August. The mason showed up.
Joaquim has returned to work with the chaux-based product mixed with our pigments to darken the bands on the house, first, and then deepen the ocher tone on the parts of the house where it turned out lighter, more like a dark straw yellow.
Meanwhile, it's an opportunity to bond over a Heineken. Georges very reasonably preferred a jus d'orange. I can tell you that it's working fast and furious out there.
See for yourselves.
I might be having lunch alone. Venus is about to play Maria, and my drawings aren't 100%. Joaquim has added his voice to Georges', trying to talk me out of brick on the ground. He's a stone guy. I love stone, too, but not on the ground here. Hard to believe they haven't seen the pathways and terraces I have in brick.
The sentiment "C'est de la terre cuite. C'est pour les murs" about sums it up. ....
Rep. Wiener, D-NY withdraws single-payer amendment in committee for full house vote in September
Pst. Spread the word. Only YOU can make health care AVAILABLE and AFFORDABLE with FREEDOM OF CHOICE for EVERYONE.
Call your representatives in Washington, and then, write them a letter.
Oh, and there are no long lines here in France. Ask any American living here.
Former Cigna head of corporate communications Wendell Potter with Bill Moyers (see the video here. Pst! Spread the word.)
July 10, 2009
With almost 20 years inside the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter saw for-profit insurers hijack our health care system and put profits before patients. Now, he speaks with Bill Moyers about how those companies are standing in the way of health care reform.
BILL MOYERS: Wendell Potter joins us now. Welcome to the Journal.
WENDELL POTTER: Thank you very much for having me here.
BILL MOYERS: You worked for CIGNA 15 years and left last year.
WENDELL POTTER: I did.
BILL MOYERS: Were you pushed out?
WENDELL POTTER: I was not. I left-- it was my decision to leave, and my decision to leave when I did.
BILL MOYERS: Were you passed over for a promotion?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely not. No.
BILL MOYERS: Had you been well-paid and rewarded by the company?
WENDELL POTTER: Very well-paid. And I, over the years, had many job opportunities, many bonuses, salary increases. So no, I was not. And in fact, there was no further place for me to go in the company. I was head of corporate communications and that was the ultimate PR job.
BILL MOYERS: Did you like your boss and the people you work with?
WENDELL POTTER: I did, and still do. I still respect them.
BILL MOYERS: And they gave you a terrific party when you left?
WENDELL POTTER: They sure did, yeah.
BILL MOYERS: So why are you speaking out now?
WENDELL POTTER: I didn't intend to, until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used over the years, and particularly back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.
BILL MOYERS: But during this 15 years you were there, did you go to them and say, "You know, I think we're on the wrong side. I think we're fighting the wrong people here."
WENDELL POTTER: You know, I didn't, because for most of the time I was there, I felt that what we were doing was the right thing. And that I was playing on a team that was honorable. I just didn't really get it all that much until toward the end of my tenure at Cigna.
BILL MOYERS: What did you see?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was beginning to question what I was doing as the industry shifted from selling primarily managed care plans, to what they refer to as consumer-driven plans. And they're really plans that have very high deductibles, meaning that they're shifting a lot of the cost off health care from employers and insurers, insurance companies, to individuals. And a lot of people can't even afford to make their co-payments when they go get care, as a result of this. But it really took a trip back home to Tennessee for me to see exactly what is happening to so many Americans. I--
BILL MOYERS: When was this?
WENDELL POTTER: This was in July of 2007.
BILL MOYERS: You were still working for Cigna?
WENDELL POTTER: I was. I went home, to visit relatives. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued.
BILL MOYERS: So you drove there?
WENDELL POTTER: I did. I borrowed my dad's car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.
But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.
And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.
There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.
BILL MOYERS: What did you think?
WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.
BILL MOYERS: People are going to say, "How can Wendell Potter sit here and say he was just finding out that there were a lot of Americans who didn't have adequate insurance and needed health care? He'd been in the industry for over 15 years."
WENDELL POTTER: And that was my problem. I had been in the industry and I'd risen up in the ranks. And I had a great job. And I had a terrific office in a high-rise building in Philadelphia. I was insulated. I didn't really see what was going on. I saw the data. I knew that 47 million people were uninsured, but I didn't put faces with that number.
Just a few weeks later though, I was back in Philadelphia and I would often fly on a corporate aircraft to go to meetings.
And I just thought that was a great way to travel. It is a great way to travel. You're sitting in a luxurious corporate jet, leather seats, very spacious. And I was served my lunch by a flight attendant who brought my lunch on a gold-rimmed plate. And she handed me gold-plated silverware to eat it with. And then I remembered the people that I had seen in Wise County. Undoubtedly, they had no idea that this went on, at the corporate levels of health insurance companies.
BILL MOYERS: But you had, all these years, seen premiums rising. People purged from the rolls, people who couldn't afford the health care that Cigna and other companies were offering. This is the first time you came face to face with it?
WENDELL POTTER: Yeah, it was. You know, certainly, I knew people, and I talked to people who were uninsured. But when you're in the executive offices, when you're getting prepared for a call with an analyst, in the financial medium, what you think about are the numbers. You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations. That's what you think about, at that level. And it helps to think that way. That's why you-- that enables you to stay there, if you don't really think that you're talking about and dealing with real human beings.
BILL MOYERS: Did you go back to corporate headquarters and tell them what you had seen?
WENDELL POTTER: I went back to corporate headquarters. I was trying to process all this, and trying to figure out what I should do. I did tell many of them about the experience I had. And the trip. I showed them some pictures I took while I was down there. But I didn't know exactly what I should do.
You know, I had bills of my own. And it was hard to just figure out. How do I step away from this? What do I do? And this was one of those things that made me decide, "Okay, I can't do this. I can't keep-- I can't." One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."
And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."
BILL MOYERS: Your own resume says, and I'm quoting. "With the chief medical officer and his staff, Potter developed rapid response mechanisms for handling media inquiries pertaining to complaints." Direct quote. "This was highly successful in keeping most such inquiries from becoming news stories, at a time when managed care horror stories abounded." I mean, you knew there were horror stories out there.
WENDELL POTTER: I did. I did.
BILL MOYERS: You put these techniques to work, representing Cigna doing the Nataline Sarkisyan case, right?
WENDELL POTTER: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: And that was a public relations nightmare, you called it. Right?
WENDELL POTTER: It was. It was just the most difficult. We call them high profile cases, when you have a case like that — a family or a patient goes to the news media and complains about having some coverage denied that a doctor had recommended. In this case, Nataline Sarkisyan's doctors at UCLA had recommended that she have a liver transplant. But when the coverage request was reviewed at Cigna, the decision was made to deny it.
It was around that time, also, that the family had gone to the media, had sought out help from the California Nurses Association and some others to really bring pressure to bear on Cigna. And they were very successful in getting a lot of media attention, and nothing like I had ever seen before.
PROTESTERS: Shame on Cigna! Shame on Cigna!
WENDELL POTTER: It got everyone's attention. Everyone was focused on that in the corporate offices.
BILL MOYERS: You were also involved in the campaign by the industry to discredit Michael Moore and his film "Sicko" in 2007. In that film Moore went to several countries around the world, and reported that their health care system was better than our health care system, in particular, Canada and England. Take a look at this.
MICHAEL MOORE: I went across the city to a crowded hospital waiting room. How long did you have to wait here to get help?
CANADIAN WOMAN #1: 20 minutes
CANADIAN WOMAN #2: 45 minutes
CANADIAN MAN #2: I got helped right away.
CANADIAN WOMAN #3: You can see how crowded this is. They really do an amazing job.
MICHAEL MOORE: Did you have to get anyone's permission to come to this hospital?
CANADIAN MAN #2: No.
CANADIAN MAN #3: No.
CANADIAN WOMAN #1: No.
CANADIAN WOMAN #3: We can go anywhere we want.
MICHAEL MOORE: You don't have to get pre-approved?
CANADIAN WOMAN #3: No, no. You just--
MICHAEL MOORE: By your own insurance company?
CANADIAN WOMAN #3: Oh no, oh heavens no.
MICHAEL MOORE: Can you choose your own doctor?
CANADIAN WOMAN #3: Oh sure. Oh yes.
MICHAEL MOORE: What's your deductible?
CANADIAN MAN #1: Nothing.
CANADIAN WOMAN #1: I don't think we have any.
CANADIAN MAN #2: I don't know. I don't think there's any as far as I know.
CANADIAN WOMAN #3: It's really a fabulous system for making sure that the least of us and the best of us are taken care of.
BRITISH WOMAN #1: Oh, really it's not like that in the US? No. Not at all, no.
MICHAEL MOORE: So what do you pay to stay here?
BRITISH WOMAN #1: No one pays. They're asking, "How do people pay?" And I said, well there isn't, you don't, you just leave.
BRITISH MAN #1: It's just the insurance. There's no bill at the end of it, as it were.
MICHAEL MOORE: Even with insurance, there's bound to be a bill somewhere. So where's the billing department?
BRITISH WOMAN #1: There isn't really a billing department.
BRITISH WOMAN #2: There's no such thing as a billing department.
MICHAEL MOORE: What did they charge you for that baby?
BRITISH WOMAN #3: Sorry?
MICHAEL MOORE: You've got to pay before you can get out of here, right?
BRITISH WOMAN #3: No.
BRITISH MAN #1: No, no, no. Everything's on NHS.
BRITISH WOMAN #3: This is NHS.
BRITISH MAN #1: You know, it's not America.
BILL MOYERS: So what did you think when you saw that film?
WENDELL POTTER: I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned.
BILL MOYERS: What were they afraid of?
WENDELL POTTER: They were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore.
BILL MOYERS: We obtained a copy of the game plan that was adopted by the industry's trade association, AHIP. And it spells out the industry strategies in gold letters. It says, "Highlight horror stories of government-run systems." What was that about?
[Note: You can download the documents by clicking here and here (PDFs)]
WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.
BILL MOYERS: And there was a political strategy. "Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats' larger agenda." What does that mean?
WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, "Look, you don't want to believe this movie. You don't want to talk about it. You don't want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you."
BILL MOYERS: How?
WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you're running for reelection, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.
BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know, "Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations--"
WENDELL POTTER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: "--including the Democratic Leadership Council."
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: Then it says, "Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status."
WENDELL POTTER: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Now, that's exactly what they did, didn't they? They--
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: --radicalized Moore, so that his message was discredited because the messenger was seen to be radical.
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely. In memos that would go back within the industry — he was never, by the way, mentioned by name in any memos, because we didn't want to inadvertently write something that would wind up in his hands. So the memos would usually-- the subject line would be-- the emails would be, "Hollywood." And as we would do the media training, we would always have someone refer to him as Hollywood entertainer or Hollywood moviemaker Michael Moore.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, just to-- Hollywood, I think people think that's entertainment, that's movie-making. That's not real documentary. They don't want you to think that it was a documentary that had some truth. They would want you to see this as just some fantasy that a Hollywood filmmaker had come up with. That's part of the strategy.
BILL MOYERS: So you would actually hear politicians mouth the talking points that had been circulated by the industry to discredit Michael Moore.
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You'd hear ordinary people talking that. And politicians as well, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: So your plan worked.
WENDELL POTTER: It worked beautifully.
BILL MOYERS: The film was blunted, right?
WENDELL POTTER: The film was blunted. It--
BILL MOYERS: Was it true? Did you think it contained a great truth?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely did.
BILL MOYERS: What was it?
WENDELL POTTER: That we shouldn't fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it's been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don't want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It's more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you're in now to one that you don't want. You might be in the plan you like now.
But chances are, pretty soon, you're going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you're going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.
BILL MOYERS: I have a memo, from Frank Luntz. I have a memo written by Frank Luntz. He's the Republican strategist who we discovered, in the spring, has written the script for opponents of health care reform. "First," he says, "you have to pretend to support it. Then use phrases like, "government takeover," "delayed care is denied care," "consequences of rationing," "bureaucrats, not doctors prescribing medicine." That was a memo, by Frank Luntz, to the opponents of health care reform in this debate. Now watch this clip.
REP. JOHN BOEHNER: The forthcoming plan from Democratic leaders will make health care more expensive, limit treatments, ration care, and put bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions rather than patients and doctors.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL: Americans need to realize that when someone says "government option," what could really occur is a government takeover that soon could lead to government bureaucrats denying and delaying care, and telling Americans what kind of care they can have.
SEN. JON KYL: Washington run healthcare would diminish access to quality care, leading to denials, shortages and long delays for treatment.
REP. JOE WILSON: How will a government run health plan not lead to the same rationing of care that we have seen in other countries?
REP. TOM PRICE: We don't want to put the government, we don't want to put bureaucrats between a doctor and a patient.
BILL MOYERS: Why do politicians puppet messages like that?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, they are ideologically aligned with the industry. They want to believe that the free market system can and should work in this country, like it does in other industries. So they don't understand from an insider's perspective like I have, what that actually means, and the consequences of that to Americans.
They parrot those comments, without really realizing what the real situation is.
I was watching MSNBC one afternoon. And I saw Congressman Zach Wamp from Tennessee. He's just down the road from where I grew up, in Chattanooga. And he was talking-- he was asked a question about health care reform. I think it was just a day or two after the president's first-- health care reform summit. And he was one of the ones Republicans put on the tube.
And he was saying that, you know, the health care problem is not necessarily as bad as we think. That of the uninsured people, half of them are that way because they want to "go naked."
REP. ZACH WAMP: Half the people that are uninsured today choose to remain uninsured. Half of them don't have any choice but half of them choose to, what's called, go naked, and just take the chance of getting sick. They end up in the emergency room costing you and me a whole lot more money.
WENDELL POTTER: He used the word naked. It's an industry term for those who, presumably, choose not to buy insurance, because they don't want to. They don't want to pay the premiums. So he was saying that half... Well, first of all, it's nothing like that. It was an absolutely ridiculous comment. But it's an example of a member of Congress buying what the insurance industry is peddling.
BILL MOYERS: Back in 1993, the Republican propagandist, William Kristol, urged his party to block any health care proposal, in order to prevent the Democrats from being seen as the quote, "generous protector of the middle class." But today, you've got some Democrats who are going along with the industry.
Max Baucus, the senator from Montana, for example, the most important figure right now in this health care legislation that's being written in the Senate. He's resisted including a public insurance option in the reform bill, right?
WENDELL POTTER: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: Why is the industry so powerful on both sides of the aisle?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, money and relationships, ideology. The relationships-- an insurance company can hire and does hire many different lobbying firms. And they hire firms that are predominantly Republican and predominantly Democrat. And they do this because they know they need to reach influential members of Congress like Max Baucus. So there are people who used to work for Max Baucus who are in lobbying firms or on the staff of companies like Cigna or the association itself.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I just read the other day, in THE WASHINGTON POST, that Max Baucus's staff met with a group of lobbyists. Two of them had been Baucus's former chiefs of staff.
WENDELL POTTER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: I mean, they left the government. They go to work for the industry. Now they're back with an insider status. They get an access, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Oh, they do, they do. And these lobbyists' ability to raise money for these folks also is very important as well.
Lobbyists, many of the big lobbyists contributed a lot of money themselves. One of the lobbyists for one of the big health insurance company is Heather Podesta, the Podesta Group, and she's married to Tony Podesta, who's a brother of John Podesta.
BILL MOYERS: Who used to be the White House chief of staff.
WENDELL POTTER: Right. Right. And they're Democrats. And my executives wanted to meet with — and when I say my, the people I used to work for--
BILL MOYERS: At Cigna.
WENDELL POTTER: Yeah, wanted to meet with Hillary Clinton, when she was still in the Senate and still a candidate for president. Well, that's hard to do. That's hard to pull off, but she did. That just shows you that you can, through the relationships that are formed and that the insurance industry pays for, by hiring these lobbyists, you can your foot in the door. You can get your messages across to these people, in ways that the average American couldn't possibly.
BILL MOYERS: So it's money that can buy access to have their arguments heard, right?
WENDELL POTTER: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: When ordinary citizens cannot be heard.
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely right. It's the way the American system has evolved, the political system. But it does offend me, that the vested special interests, who are so profitable and so powerful, are able to influence public policy in the way that they have, and the way that they've done over the years. And the insurance industry has been one of the most successful, in beating back any kinds of legislation that would hinder or affect the profitability of the companies.
BILL MOYERS: Why is public insurance, a public option, so fiercely opposed by the industry?
WENDELL POTTER: The industry doesn't want to have any competitor. In fact, over the course of the last few years, has been shrinking the number of competitors through a lot of acquisitions and mergers. So first of all, they don't want any more competition period. They certainly don't want it from a government plan that might be operating more efficiently than they are, that they operate. The Medicare program that we have here is a government-run program that has administrative expenses that are like three percent or so.
BILL MOYERS: Compared to the industry's--
WENDELL POTTER: They spend about 20 cents of every premium dollar on overhead, which is administrative expense or profit. So they don't want to compete against a more efficient competitor.
BILL MOYERS: You told Congress that the industry has hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street. You said, "I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors." How do they satisfy their Wall Street investors?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, there's a measure of profitability that investors look to, and it's called a medical loss ratio. And it's unique to the health insurance industry. And by medical loss ratio, I mean that it's a measure that tells investors or anyone else how much of a premium dollar is used by the insurance company to actually pay medical claims. And that has been shrinking, over the years, since the industry's been dominated by, or become dominated by for-profit insurance companies. Back in the early '90s, or back during the time that the Clinton plan was being debated, 95 cents out of every dollar was sent, you know, on average was used by the insurance companies to pay claims. Last year, it was down to just slightly above 80 percent.
So, investors want that to keep shrinking. And if they see that an insurance company has not done what they think meets their expectations with the medical loss ratio, they'll punish them. Investors will start leaving in droves.
I've seen a company stock price fall 20 percent in a single day, when it did not meet Wall Street's expectations with this medical loss ratio.
For example, if one company's medical loss ratio was 77.9 percent, for example, in one quarter, and the next quarter, it was 78.2 percent. It seems like a small movement. But investors will think that's ridiculous. And it's horrible.
BILL MOYERS: That they're spending more money for medical claims.
WENDELL POTTER: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: And less money on profits?
WENDELL POTTER: Exactly. And they think that this company has not done a good job of managing medical expenses. It has not denied enough claims. It has not kicked enough people off the rolls. And that's what-- that is what happens, what these companies do, to make sure that they satisfy Wall Street's expectations with the medical loss ratio.
BILL MOYERS: And they do what to make sure that they keep diminishing the medical loss ratio?
WENDELL POTTER: Rescission is one thing. Denying claims is another. Being, you know, really careful as they review claims, particularly for things like liver transplants, to make sure, from their point of view, that it really is medically necessary and not experimental. That's one thing. And that was that issue in the Nataline Sarkisyan case.
But another way is to purge employer accounts, that-- if a small business has an employee, for example, who suddenly has have a lot of treatment, or is in an accident. And medical bills are piling up, and this employee is filing claims with the insurance company. That'll be noticed by the insurance company.
And when that business is up for renewal, and it typically is up, once a year, up for renewal, the underwriters will look at that. And they'll say, "We need to jack up the rates here, because the experience was," when I say experience, the claim experience, the number of claims filed was more than we anticipated. So we need to jack up the price. Jack up the premiums. Often they'll do this, knowing that the employer will have no alternative but to leave. And that happens all the time.
They'll resort to things like the rescissions that we saw earlier. Or dumping, actually dumping employer groups from the rolls. So the more of my premium that goes to my health claims, pays for my medical coverage, the less money the company makes.
BILL MOYERS: So, the more of my premium that goes to my health claims, pays for my medical coverage, the less money the company makes.
WENDELL POTTER: That's right. Exactly right.
BILL MOYERS: So they want to reverse that. They don't want my premium to go for my health care, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Exactly right. They--
BILL MOYERS: Where does it go?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, a big chunk of it goes into shareholders' pockets. It's returned to them as part of the investment to them. It goes into the exorbitant salaries that a lot of the executives make. It goes into paying sales, marketing, and underwriting expenses. So a lot of it goes to pay those kinds of administrative functions. Overhead.
BILL MOYERS: When a member of Congress asked the three executives who appeared before the committee-- if they would end the practice of canceling policies for sick enrollees, they refused. Why did they refuse?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, they were talking to Wall Street at that moment. They were saying that because-- I guess they might have to spend some additional dollars to be more vigilant, to make sure that they were not rescinding a policy inappropriately. It makes no sense. The only reason they would have said that is to cover themselves. And to send a signal to Wall Street that you know, we're going to continue business as usual here.
You know, I've been around a long time. And I have to say, I just don't get this. I just don't understand how the corporations can oppose a plan that gives the unhealthy people a chance to be covered. And they don't want to do it themselves.
Well, keep in mind, what they want to do is enhance their profits. Enhance shareholder value. That's number one. And the way that the business that they're in is health care, certainly. But their primary motivation is to reward their shareholders.
Most of the shareholders are large, institutional investors and hedge funds. Hedge fund managers are the ones who look at the stock. And investors for large organizations. It's not mom and pop investor.
BILL MOYERS: You wrote a column with the headline, "Obama's false friends of health reform." You use as a prime example a man named Ron Williams, who is at the top of the list of insurance executives in terms of their compensation. We actually saw Ron Williams at President Obama's Town Hall meeting .
RON WILLIAMS: I would commend the president for the commitment he's made to really try to get and keep everyone covered. And I think as a health insurance company we are committed to that.
BILL MOYERS: Who is Ron Williams, and why do you use him as the example of what Wall Street expects and wants from the insurance companies?
WENDELL POTTER: He has, apparently, had a seat at the table of health care discussion. He was recruited by Aetna from WellPoint. Aetna had gone on a buying binge. There's been an enormous amount of consolidation in the health insurance industry over the last several years. Aetna bought a lot of competitors.
It reached 21 million members. And, but what it realized and what investors began to see is that a lot of the businesses that it had bought were not all that profitable. So they were in Aetna was in a pickle. And they saw their stock price starting to plummet. So they brought-- among the things they did was bring Ron Williams in. And Williams, among the first thing he did was order a revamp of the IT system, so that--
BILL MOYERS: The information technology system--
WENDELL POTTER: Exactly, so that the company could determine more about which accounts were not profitable or margining profitable. So with that new system, he was able, and the other executives to identify the accounts that they wanted to get rid of. And over the course of a very few years, they shed eight million members.
BILL MOYERS: Eight million policy holders?
WENDELL POTTER: Eight million people, men, women, and children, yes.
Some of them were shed by intention. Some, I'm sure, probably walked because the-- or left for whatever other reason, but they intentionally had this program to purge these accounts. Eight million fewer people were enrolled in Aetna's plans. Many of them undoubtedly joined the ranks of the uninsured, because their employers had been purged.
BILL MOYERS: So what happened to Aetna's stock?
WENDELL POTTER: Went up. And it has--
BILL MOYERS: And so did Ron's--
WENDELL POTTER: And--
BILL MOYERS: --compensation, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Ron's compensation and his stock on Wall Street.
RON WILLIAMS: And so I think in the context of thinking about a government plan, what we say is, let's identify the problem we're trying to solve. Let's work collaboratively with physicians, hospitals, and other health care professionals, and make certain that we solve the problem, as opposed to introduce a new competitor who has the rulemaking ability that government would have.
BILL MOYERS: You know, there's an irony, because you hear the companies and their trade groups talking about how we don't want a public option that would put a bureaucrat between a patient and his doctor. But you've just described a situation in which a CEO is actually between a doctor and the patient,
WENDELL POTTER: It's true. And that same thing happened, in the Nataline Sarkisyan case. You had a corporate bureaucrat making a decision on coverage. So, they are trying to make you worry. And fear a government bureaucrat being between you and your doctor. What you have now is a corporate bureaucrat between you and your doctor.
BILL MOYERS: Whose motive is profit. Understandably, naturally, profit.
WENDELL POTTER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: But companies, any company is in business to make a profit, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Oh, absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: So how can you object? How can we object when an insurance company wants to increase its profits? That's a serious question. I mean, it sounds like a set-up but it's a serious question.
WENDELL POTTER: It's a very serious question. And I think that people who are strong advocates of our health care system remaining as it is, very much a free market health care system, fail to realize that we're really talking about human beings here. And it doesn't work as well as they would like it to. Yeah, there's nothing wrong. And I'm a capitalist as well. I think it's a wonderful thing that companies can make a profit. But when you do it in such a way that you are creating a situation in which these companies are adding to the number of people who are uninsured and creating a problem of the underinsured then that's when we have a problem with it, or at least I do.
BILL MOYERS: This is the key question for me. Can health reform that includes a public plan actually rid our system of the financial incentive on the part of the insurance industry to provide less for more?
WENDELL POTTER: It will help. It would help. Would it rid it? No, I don't think it would, because of the for-profit structure that is now dominant in this country. But the public plan would do a lot to keep them honest, because it would have to offer a standard benefit plan. It would have to operate more efficiently, as does the Medicare program. It would be structured, I'm certain on a level playing field, so that it wouldn't be unfair advantage to the private insurance companies. But because it could be administered more efficiently, then the private insurers, they would have to operate more efficiently. And that 20 cents in that medical loss ratio we talked about earlier might get narrower. And they don't want that.
BILL MOYERS: As this debate unfolds in the next month, into the fall, what should we be watching for? Tell us as an insider what to look for that is more than meets the eye?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, what happens is they will continue this charm offensive, until there's actual legislative language. And what that means, of course, is that right now, you're not really seeing the bills before the House and the Senate that will actually be voted on. When we see the actual legislation, when there's something before Congress, and it will happen, presumably, within the next few weeks, you'll start seeing a lot more criticism of it.
And the special interests will be attacking this or that. The AMA will be upset about something. The pharmaceutical industry will be upset about something. The insurance industry will not like this or that. It's, you know, a lot of money is made in this country off sick people. And then you'll start seeing a lot more of the behind-the-scenes attacks on this legislation, in an attempt to kill it. The status quo is what would work best for these industries.
BILL MOYERS: In other words, if the industry is able to kill reform, or the Democrats and the Republicans can't agree on a proposal, that's what the industry really wants.
WENDELL POTTER: Exactly. And it happened in '93 and '94. And just about every time there has been significant legislation before Congress, the industry has been able to kill it. Yeah, the status quo works for them. They don't like to have any regulation forced on them or laws forced on them. They don't want to have any competition from the federal government, or any additional regulation from the federal government. They say they will accept it. But the behavior is that they will not-- you know, they'll not do anything after say this plan fails.
Say nothing happens. They're saying now what they did in '93, '94. "We think preexisting conditions is a bad thing," for example. Let's watch and see if they really take the initiative to do anything constructive. I bet you won't see it. They didn't then.
BILL MOYERS: Well, on the basis of the past performance, and on the basis of your own experience in the industry, can we believe them when they say they will do these things voluntarily?
WENDELL POTTER: I don't think you can. I think that they will implement things that make them more efficient. And that enhance shareholder value. And if what they do contributes to that, maybe so. But now, they do say, they are in favor of an individual mandate. They want us all to be insured.
BILL MOYERS: For the government to require every one of us to have some policy.
WENDELL POTTER: Exactly. And that sounds great. It is an important thing that everyone be enrolled in some kind of a benefit plan. They don't want a public plan. They want all the uninsured to have to be enrolled in a private insurance plan. They want-- they see those 50 million people as potentially 50 million new customers. So they're in favor of that. They see this as a way to essentially lock them into the system, and ensure their profitability in the future. The strategy is as it was in 1993 and '94, to conduct this charm offensive on the surface. But behind the scenes, to use front groups and third-party advocates and ideological allies. And those on Capitol Hill who are aligned with them, philosophically, to do the dirty work. To demean and scare people about a government-run plan, try to make people not even remember that Medicare, their Medicare program, is a government-run plan that has operated a lot more efficiently.
And also, the people who are enrolled in our Medicare plan like it better. The satisfaction ratings are higher in our Medicare program, a government-run program, than in private insurance. But they don't want you to remember that or to know that, and they want to scare you into thinking that through the anecdotes they tell you, that any government-run system, particularly those in Canada, and UK, and France that the people are very unhappy.
And that these people will have to wait in long lines to get care, or wait a long time to get care. I'd like to take them down to Wise County. I'd like the president to come down to Wise County, and see some real lines of Americans, standing in line to get their care.
BILL MOYERS: Wendell Potter thank you very much for being with me on the Journal
The first hind legs (they develop first) appeared over last weekend on the largest of the tadpoles, at about 1 month old. I first spotted them on June 24. If you click on the picture, you can see it much larger, and there they are, delicate hind legs.
The head, which ends up being the head and body, is starting to look very froggish, with the beginnings of the wide mouth and bulging eyes. It's also developing the frog's eventual color, green in this case, with the stripe forming down the back from the tip of the nose.
There are lots of tadpoles. Audouin keeps asking what I am going to do with them, suggesting that we need to get rid of them, and I just tell him that nature will see to that all on its own. In this particular species, and perhaps it is true of others, the frogs born that year do not hibernate in water. They leave their birth area. This is perhaps the mechanism that helps determine the fittest that will survive and forces them to establish territory. They won't all return to our fish-pond-in-the-fountain.
The time of the year when everything that can possibly come to a halt comes to a halt. Nothing happens. The turtles would pack up their things under their shells and leave, if they had anywhere to go. The shutters on the houses close for the evening, and don't reopen in the morning. The parking spaces along the street that are jealously guarded, are vacant. The tools that sawed and leveled, are stowed away. The shopkeepers that open their door after lunch, hang a sign, "Fermée le 1 au 29 août pour les vacances", and leave the blinds drawn.
Villages and cities empty of everyone except tourists. The French have places to go, families to gather together in their ancestral origins. Some make the rounds, pilgrimmage circuits between the homes of family and friends. Some have left already and will return to go back to work when life is the most deserted. Most have to go now because their place of business is "fermée jusqu'au __ août".
Men attach the roof carriers or hitch the trailers (sometimes both) or camping trailers, secure the bikes and load the bags to the ceilings, call their children and their GameBoys and iPhones to their places and stuff the family pet in after.
"Tout le monde a fait pipi?"
"Pas moi," comes a voice.
"Moi non plus." He opens the secured shutter and unlocks the safety locks to let them in for un dernier pipi.
"Tout le monde est prêt?"
"Oui, papa!"
"On y va alors." He starts the car, riding lower than usual, and heads up the street and out of the village.
"Papa?"
"C'est quoi encore?"
"J'ai oublié mon doudou." Heaving the proverbial parental sigh, and muttering choice words under his breath, his wife bracing for a long trip, he turns the family vehicle, trailer and bike rack around to head back, reopen the shutter, unlock the door, turn the electricity back on, and go find the missing doudou.
"Allez, c'est bon maintenant?"
"Papa?"
"Et quoi encore?"
"J'ai fait pipi au chien, et il m'a échappé." A long, long trip.
For us, it means the work grinds to a halt. Georges warned my husband (I have finally grown used to saying that, after nearly 7 years) and I yesterday.
"Monsieur, j'ai hésité de le dire à Madame parce qu'elle va se fâcher," he cast me a glance and smiled, the kind of smile that hopes to make things alright, looking back to my husband, home earlier than usual after a night on duty, "mais je pense que les autres vont partir en vacances." He took time for a breath and hurried a little faster through the rest of his announcement, before we had time to open our mouths, "Moi, je reste, mais les autres," he lifted his shoulders and glanced at me, "il faut que je les laisse prendre leurs vacances." He had finished. It was out. It meant that nothing to speak of, really, would happen in August, since Jose would be away. The new guy, Pierro, too.
The sky didn't fall. We knew they weren't going to finish for the end of July, or the end of August. My husband had already been over that territory a hundred times with me, and I had been the one to hear his frustration. Georges wouldn't.
Heureux Georges.
It hadn't, however, occurred to me how close we were to August and Jose's departure. It was the next day, today.
They took down the tree at the corner that my husband had so long defended and made the case to keep.
"Tu veux la petite addition, l'entrée à la cuisine, ou l'abre? Car c'est l'une ou l'autre."
"D'accord, d'accord. L'addition," he said at last.
"OK."
Georges knocked this morning. I was at the diningtop computer, making absolutely sure I didn't regret my paving matieral and pattern, starting the brick pillars at the entry gate.
"Madame," he calls me Madame and my first or last name, alternatively, "on abat l'abre?"
"Oui, Georges, abattez-le."
"Vous en êtes sûre? Votre mari est d'accord?"
"Oui, Georges. Il est d'accord maintenant. Allez-y."
Down came the tree. They cleared out the trunk and the limbs, had lunch and then scraped up the masonry debris from the demolition of the little pillars and buts of low wall and threshold in the entry court. Georges knocked again.
"Je peux m'asseoir?" Yes, George, of course you may sit down.
"Je n'aime pas en parler, mais les autres, il partent en vacances. Je serai seul pour le mois d'août." There, he said it. The others were leaving. At the end of the day, which I realized a short time later, at the end of our "state of the chantier (site)" and what-he-could-do-to-prepare-for-the start-of-work-again-in-September meeting, was right then.
The long and short of it is that by the end of September, he plans to have the entry court paved, the pillars built, the low wall covered in the same color natural stucco (chaux) as the base of the house, the brick facing on the side wall of the court, the gate and grilles painted and installed, and possible the structure of the kitchen entry in place. The rest of it, or all of it, will be for the month of November, along with the additional main terrace paving.
Joaquim is to come early next week to talk stone for the paving with me and start on the pigmented chaux-based coloration to darken the brown bands (and add punch to the ochre) so that I can be sure the paint color for the windows is right. Then, they can get the paint to us, and I can start that during August, or September.
Whenever we choose.
"Je comprends, Madame," he used my last name, "J'en ai déjà parlé à Joaquim. Je ne sais pas s'il est disponible lundi, mais s'il ne l'est pas, je viendrai moi-même il viendra avec moi pour le couleur et la pierre rapidement." Let us hope.
It's so depressing. I hate it, and I can't bring myself to admit it, nor how disappointed I am.
What's wrong? Let me count the things.
It has gone on too long. Far too long. Back in December or early January, I said (kindly) to Joaquim, "Mais vous allez perdre votre enthousiasme."
"Mais, comment ça que je vais perdre mon enthousiasme?" he said, faking it. How could that be that I could lose my enthusiasm for this wonderful project? Let me count the ways.
"C'est normal. Quand un chantier dur trop longtemps, pour n'importe quelles raisons, des bonnes comme des mauvaises, on perd son enthousiasme. Un chantier n'est pas sensé de traîner. Si ça traîne, c'est pour une raison, et ça entraîne, forcément et sans rater, une baisse de moral et une perte d'engagement." It's true, projects and building sites have an inherent rhythm, and when they lose that, it always means that something is wrong. Whether the loss of enthusiasm is the cause or the consequence, it always ends in the same thing: a loss of commitment and morale. He looked at me with that incredulous, idiotic, insane grin that inhabits his face, when he is not outragé, which is more often the case, and shook his head.
"Mais non!"
That was before the dicussions about not doing the somewhat newer part of the house because it was not part of the contract when we all knew perfectly well that it was. Don't take me for an idiot. Tell me the truth, I can't do it unless you pay me more because I never should have signed that contract, which, I acknowledge (c'mon, give the poor dog a bone here, would you?), I was wrong to sign.
That was before they disappeared weeks and months to do another project to put money in their coffers to pay themselves.
That was before they returned after our letter to work out the new contractual conditions, and he went on and on, defending himself, attacking us, misunderstanding everything with a deliberateness that took the breath of even this American who has seen the Bush-Cheney years and the insurance industry battle fiercely to protect their wealth at everyone else's peril, while they defend their God-given right to do so. As though God would ever have envisioned savage capitalism. We all here in Europe know perfectly well that God imagined capitalism at the service of the social good.
That was before they finally did return (sans Joaquim) and began again, but seeming, to me, without the same care for detail.
And then, yesterday.
I spent the afternoon at my laptop working on the terrace paving plans just on the other side of the window, where Georges and Jose labored to install and reinstall and fix and install again the metal shutters on one -- count them, 1 -- window. I sat in dread of my husband's return from the hospital, when he'd ask, "Ils ont fait quoi aujourd'hui?" and then add his commentary, "Parce que je ne vois pas grandes choses," and I would say, "Oui, ils ont payé cher le fait qu'ils n'ont pas anticipé la réinstallation des volets, et ils ont bavé." I want to criticize them and protect them at the same time, like big children, who are making a brave effort, but haven't quite figured out how to do their job. I could tell them, but it is their job.
"Ils sont bordeliques," he'd say. Yes, they are poorly organized. He'd shake his head and get worked up over it. He'd tell his son that he probably wouldn't spend all the two weeks he'd taken in August in Dordogne because there were "too many things to do here," and I'd say, "You can't do that. You know, your children count on having a vacation with their father, the grown and the growing."
"On aurait du (understand tu aurais du) être en train de peindre les huiseries (windows) depuis longtemps. Chaque week-end en juillet on aurait du être en train de travailler sur des choses à la maison." He forgets that he was on duty at least two of those Saturdays, and had his daughter at least one, and perhaps two, of the Sundays. The painting of the windows was one of the items in the contract we took upon ourselves to make the contract sum go farther for them.
"Je te l'ai dit que je ne veux pas peindre les fenêtres avant qu'on ne voit la couleur définitive du marron des motifs." He didn't want to hear me.
"Si on avait commencé quand il l'aurait fallu --"
"Je t'ai dit que je ne veux pas perdre notre temps. Je pense qu'il faut attendre de peindre les huiseries quand on sait ce qu'ils peuvent vraiment faire pour foncer la couleur des motifs." If we paint the windows before we see the final color, we risk a disharmony. If we wait, we can try to adapt the color of the windows to the brown we can obtain. It's important to me. Color is important to me, and I have already had to make too many compromises when I am already compromised in how good I am. He started to argue again. I spoke.
"Je peux les peindre là," I pointed to the open space that is neither living room nor entry nor dining room, unfurnishable space behind the backs of the armchairs and the stair and dining table, "en septembre et octobre." He was stuck on the end date. We had said July. It wasn't going to be July. It was never going to be July, and there is more work to do.
"Je ne vais pas passer encore un mois de décembre avec les huiseries démontées." There was a threat in that utterance. I had best not be painting them in December, or I'd have hell to pay.
I still hadn't shown him the changes I had made to the entry and terrace plan, changes I made to take his concerns into consideration, and he was right about a number of them. My confidence was doing a nosedive. I was starting to feel like a useless, time and money-wasting idiot. Who needs a terrace plan is really is only point of view. He likes the fake stone stepping stones that lead from the entry courtyard to the doors. I hate them. He doesn't care that the grass doesn't grow properly around them, that it leaves a strange band of difficult to care for grass stranded between them and the planting bed at the foundation of the house. It doesn't concern him that whenever we cross this area and walk into the house, we dirty the floor because it is normal to have some kind of more continous mineralized area to walk on leading to one's doors. What's more, there has to be a way to lead people -- our guests staying overnight -- to their rooms in the petite maison. A continuation of the fake stone stepping stones left all over the place by the previous owners is not a solution.
"Je ne sais pas," he said later, when I was finally able to show him the new plan, "je me demande si la terrasse là n'est pas trop importante, ne prend pas trop de place, ne soit pas, enfin, trop de brique." He was referring to the terrace I would like for the table he likes. The one from Morocco. It has sat on the grass, on a slight slope, threatening to send us and anyone dining with us off their chairs that wobble dangerously on the uneven ground, which, what's more, wets and chills our feet as the dew forms.
"C'est prévu pour la table. Il faut de la place pour elle, pour les chaises, et pour pouvoir circuler autour."
"Oui, mais, je ne suis pas convaincu qu'elle soit nécessaire. On peut (here it came) mettre la table sur le gazon (lawn) comme on fait maitenant." I explained about the uneven ground, the dew, and the importance of creating outdoor space, just like indoor space; that a paved area creates a room with a purpose. "Je n'ai jamais vu autant de... brique. D'ailleurs, je n'ai jamais vu que ça soit nécessaire de faire tout ça." "Tout ça" was the path along the front of the house, made narrower and pulled farther away to diminish the paved area and increase the area left for planting against the house to address his concerns. "Et," he went on, "j'ai aimé les arbustes dans l'entrée mais si tu veux les supprimer --"
If we have bushes in the entry area, then we can't, I explained, have the entry addition to the kitchen. It's one or the other. You choose.
"Non, non. C'est bien l'entrée."
"On peut avoir des plantes en containeur, des plantes grimpantes. On peut mettre de la verdure."
And so it went. I still felt depressed when we woke up this morning, he announcing again that he hadn't slept all night, I thinking that my efforts are superfluous, inconsequential, inane compared to his work -- "real work" -- at the hospital. Or that's how it feels. Who cares about the creation of a sense of outdoor space? It's like a parent patting a child's hand in absent-minded praise of something he scarcely notices.
"Tu sais, ce n'est pas juste trois ou quatre traits tirés sur un papier pour montrer une organisation d'espace. Il y toute une réflexion derrière pour pouvoir le faire. Les matières, leur coloration, leur tailles et la question d'échelle, de direction, de géométrie --"
"Je sais," he said.
"Non, tu ne sais pas. Tu ne le vois même pas. Tu vois un endroit pavé et tu dis 'Oh la, c'est un endroit pavé; il faut le réduire' pas 'Ca serait bien pour définir la place de la table et rajouter à notre confort.' J'ai l'impression de vivre sur une autre planète. Tu me demandes de marquer les terrasses et les chemins avec des piques et de la ficelle, mais tu sais quoi? Les architects et les paysagistes ne peuvent pas faire ça pur leurs clients. On fait des dessins et des maquettes, et on vous demande de faire un éffort d'imagination pour visualiser le concept du projet. Si tu ne peux pas, peut-être ça voudrait dire qu'on sait finalement mieux que toi parce qu'on peut. C'est notre métier, c'est pourquoi on est architect et pas médecin."
Rant over.
He tried to recover the thing.
"Mais, je voudrais qu'on le marque au sol, et il faut savoir combien ça va coûter car si c'est 6,000 euros, ça ne vaudra pas la dépense. On a aussi le toit de la petite maison qui va coûter cher --"
"Ca ne va pas coûter si cher que ça."
"Oh si. Quand on voit déjà le prix qu'il a demandé pour les goutières... il va pas s'en privé."
I agree that we need to know how much it is going to cost, but I also feel much more strongly than he that it is essential work to finish the renovation. Why would we put several tens of thousands of euros into redoing the exterior of the house to leave the terrace the way it is, the garden front of the house sitting in an unplanned yard? That makes no sense. I told him so.
We need to live in an apartment closer to Paris where I can go work for someone and make enough money to help us do these projects once we can better afford them, rather than live with the constant stress -- for me -- of not really having what we need to make this house -- inside and out -- something of which we can be proud.
"Toi, tu peux vivre comme ça et ça ne te gêne pas, mais je ne peux pas. J'ai honte de chez nous et j'en ai marre de me sentir comme ça, de ne jamais vouloir recevoir les gens ou même faire le ménage car la maison est si vite sallopée par tout le monde, qui s'en fou, d'ailleurs, comme toi."
These are the things that depress one. To not share a common vision. To fight for every little thing and then be reminded that if it was done, it was because you insisted. To hear that what you believe is necessary is only frivolous, and worse to hear it as an attack on what you spent your university and working years learning to do. It is profoundly demeaning when you wish to be valued. They say opposites attract. Perhaps they do, but they also need to be able to appreciate deeply the qualities they lack.
Time to scrape my morale off the floor.
The representative who took me to the offices and warehouse facility the other day told me the facing brick he represents works just fine in a paving application. I contacted the same company, one whose products I used in the States, in the UK, where they offer paving bricks, and they forwarded my query for information to someone in France who handles this product, mysteriously absent from their French website, but, it turns out, available here. I put the same question to him, and this person replied a few minutes ago to tell me that the facing bricks are not, as I feared, adapted to the humidity conditions and the freezing and thawing cycles to which paving is submitted. He attached a product list and website links for Germany and Belgium and is sending a catalog.
And then there are the holes where the workers had to reinstall the steel angles for the shutters where they had removed them, along with the shutters. Holes that I am supposing they will have to patch, and which patching will not be invisible to the naked eye.
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