Changes in Healthcare, contd...

In ending the Emory retiree healthcare plan for those 65 and older, retirees are being sent to the private market for healthcare. Medicare alone is not sufficient protection, and so all retirees will want to choose in addition either a Medicare Advantage plan or Medigap Plan and a Medicare Part D drug plan. In general, there are advantages for nearly everyone in this change because there is a choice of plans and essentially everyone will pay a lower cost than they would under the Aetna plan. However, with choices comes the difficulty of deciding which plan would be best for one's particular needs.  

Emory is using One Exchange to help in this process. HR has supplied  information to retirees about making the change: those materials are available by clicking on the links at the left of this newsletter. EUEC member Jim Keller has been doing a lot of work, along with Sid Stein who is Chair of the University Senate Fringe Benefits Committee, to provide additional useful information for EUEC members. They, along with Felicia Smith in Human Resources, have organized several sessions here at the Luce Center to answer questions members have about the process. In addition, Jim compiled a FAQ list that is in addition to those supplied by HR. That very valuable list is also available by clicking the link at left. A copy of the presentation he made for EUEC members at the Luce Center is also available with a link at the left.   

I sent an email request for information from members who already had experience in the private market. The information they supplied is available in the document at left along with a summary of information supplied at the EUEC Luce Center meeting. Thanks to all of you who took the time to reply.

Although many members must make a choice of healthcare providers this year, this is a choice that will have to be made in the future by every faculty member when they retire. I hope that you will be willing to share the experiences you have had with your providers during this next year so that we can serve as a resource to help our new colleagues make the best decision when they retire.

This summer, the production in question was Antony and Cleopatra, one of Shakespeare's greatest works and yet one that is seldom done (or done well), thanks to the demands of staging a play with so many switches of scenes (and whole cultures) in which the leads must somehow evoke both laughter and tears, contempt and admiration (depending on one's cultural point of view). Is Cleopatra the "strumpet" Romans adjudge her to be-and is Antony, therefore, a "strumpet's fool" (1.1.13)? Or is she the veritable Venus immortalized in the glorious poetry Enobarbus offers, cynical Roman though he be, a woman who "make[s] defect perfection" (2.2.232): "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety"? And is Antony the Mars who's the "unmatchable" match (2.3.20) for her Egyptian Venus, a "Lord of lords, / Of infinite virtue" (4.8.16-17), as she says herself?  

The answer is that each of them is somehow both of these ostensibly opposite and incompatible things-in the rare productions whose leads can handle the demands of such a paradoxical performance. And 36 of Emory's emeriti (and family and friends) enjoyed just such a performance on Sunday evening, June 29, when two of the star players in the ASC ensemble tackled these super-challenging roles in super-successful fashion. Laura Cole, as Cleopatra, and Matt Nitchie, as Antony, had us chuckling and weeping, sneering and cheering, and everything in between. Director Jeff Watkins (founder and Artistic Director of the Company) inspired them and the strong cast that joined them to make the very most of the play's ambiguities and the resultant ambivalences in the audience response-all while moving as smoothly from scene to scene, Egypt to Rome (and points beyond) and back, as the Company's "original practice" staging allows.  

Maynard Mack, editor of the Pelican edition of the play, would have been so pleased to see the mix of the comic and tragic, the realistic and romantic, that characterizes the play on the page realized in this version of the play on the stage. In fact, Mack might have been writing of this production when he wrote  

Cleopatra is given qualities that make her a very unqueenly queen: she lies, wheedles, sulks, screams, and makes love, all with equal abandon. Antony is given qualities that make him in some senses more like an elderly playboy than a tragic hero. We are encouraged by Shakespeare in this play to disengage ourselves from the protagonists, to feel superior to them, even to laugh at them, as we rarely are with his earlier tragic persons.  

Against laughter, however, the playwright poises sympathy and even admiration. Tawdry though he has made these seasoned old campaigners in love and war, he has also magnified and idealized them, to the point at which their mutual passion becomes glorious as well as cheap. (pp.14-15)

Laugh at these lead characters we certainly did, so much so that several of the emeriti in attendance asked Gretchen if they were supposed to be laughing . . . Of course, who could do otherwise when Cleopatra so menaces the messenger who brings news of Antony's marriage to Octavia that she nearly kills him. And then there's the scene in which Antony nearly kills himself (thinking she has killed herself already). That wouldn't normally be funny, but when the world-renowned warrior can't even fall on his sword successfully, we can't help but snicker, especially when the grandeur of his "final" speech is followed by a long pause and a further speech about as far from grand as it can be: "How? Not dead? Not dead?" (4.14.103) And this is not to mention the grotesquerie of the following scene in which Cleopatra and her attendants drag him up to the top of her monument so she can kiss him good-bye without risking capture below. And yet-the poetry they speak while this is going on evokes conviction that their love is true, their passion admirable, such that with his death, and her (finally, real) death to follow, there will indeed be "nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon" (4.16.67-68).

The only thing that might have made the Emeritus College theater excursion an even better experience than it was would have been an opportunity for those who attended to talk together about the play and the production of the play in the day or two following the excursion-perhaps in a seminar-style session at the Luce Building, perhaps with a little wine, a little cheese. In fact, given just this suggestion from many of those in the emeriti party, we of the EC are planning to offer more frequent theater excursions with follow-up seminars, starting this coming fall. Watch for further information about such opportunities on the EUEC website and in further editions of this newsletter.  

References:

Mack, Maynard. "Introduction." Antony and Cleopatra. The Pelican Shakespeare. New York:     Penguin Books, 1979.

Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Maynard Mack. The Pelican Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Books, l979.

Submitted by Gretchen Schulz, Professor Emerita of English, Oxford College of Emory University

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John D. Henry, Sr., began his relationship with Emory in 1953 as a 15-year-old college freshman. Now CEO emeritus of Emory's two largest hospitals and Wesley Woods Center, he has a distinguished history of leadership and vision that helped Emory Healthcare take its place among the nation's best health care providers.

A gifted administrator with an eye for detail, he led Emory Hospitals for 40 years.

Henry began his administrative residency in 1963 at Crawford Long Hospital (now called Emory University Hospital Midtown). Named CEO of Crawford Long in 1985, he continued the legacy of hospital leaders, Wadley Glenn and W. Daniel Barker. "I believe in taking care of people," he says. "If you take good care of your employees, they'll take good care of your patients."

Henry faced the greatest challenge of his career when he was appointed CEO of Emory Hospitals and tasked with uniting Crawford Long Hospital and Emory University Hospital in 1995. Each hospital had its own policies, information systems, and cadre of more than 40 clinical and nonclinical departments. He worked with leadership to meld the best of both hospitals into an efficient whole.

Henry's greatest achievement is the $270 million redevelopment of Emory Crawford Long Hospital in 2002. He worked with staff and physicians to create the state-of-the-art, 20-story building.

Retiring from Emory Hospitals in 2003, Henry served first as COO then as CEO of the Grady Health System because he wanted to give back to the community. Fully retired since 2007, he now serves on three hospital boards.

Click here to see a video about the award. 

About Wadley R. Glenn, MD
Under Dr. Wadley R. Glenn's leadership, Crawford W. Long Memorial Hospital, now Emory University Hospital Midtown, created Atlanta's first blood bank and first premature baby nursery, established a nuclear medicine unit, and facilitated the creation of the Carlyle Fraser Heart Center. A skilled surgeon known for his advocacy of the patient and his commitment to clinical excellence, Dr. Glenn became the hospital's second medical director in 1953. His life's work reflects the impressive
accomplishments of Emory University Hospital Midtown's past and present. His family's generosity made possible the Wadley R. Glenn Chair of Surgery at Emory University Hospital Midtown.

The above article is from Emory News.  Click here  to see the original article. 

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