Under Assault: teaching in NYC: September 2026

September 2, 2026

Coverage by cartel

GREAT way to call the healthcare monopolies what they really are.

I heard it listening to the James Talarico / Mark Cuban interview, where they seem to be teaming up to go after “Big Medicine,” at least in Texas.

https://www.youtube.com/live/3aOl8nE2sPI?is=p2Fw1whNZFKTq4Ug

I’ve already used Cuban’s CostPlus firm once, to buy a generic that my oh-so-wonderful retiree plan decided to push out of its formulary this year. Prime Therapeutics (our new pharmacy benefit manager) is now forcing the brand on us for that particular med, when I’ve been getting the generic for more than a decade. It’s been working fine. And it’s cheaper.

Curious if they can get any of the scaredy-cat Congresspeople on their side. Though my eyes are open.

Talarico talks religion way too much – I hate it when these Christian politicians keep bringing in the Bible when you don’t have to be religious to know the difference between right and wrong and want to help your neighbors. Cuban’s a billionaire, which in my book is a big strike against him right there.

But I like the sound of that phrase: Coverage by cartel. It’s catchy.

The author of this blog

UA retired from teaching after 24 years, having built more than a couple of dozen school choruses and conducted them in well over 100 concerts. Her absences have been infrequent, her ratings satisfactory, and she teaches with enthusiasm. In some years, up to 450 students have passed through her classroom each school year.

UA was a musicologist before she became a teacher and held the position of senior staff editor on the world's largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia of music (The New Grove Dictionary of Music, 29 vols.). She is known for her scholarly work on some of the longest (and most tedious) bibliographical articles in the main work and the subsequent offshoot reference books. She also trained as a coloratura in New York, London and Italy, and has a working knowledge of several other languages.

After a flirtation with rumba and tango, UA wrote a play on ballroom partner dancing called Real Changes, which makes side trips into Zen, intellectualism/eroticism, tragedy/comedy, a parody of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, Nietzsche's early works, and nirvana. (She is still not clear which of these should dominate the psyche, but is happy to have spent four years trying to find out.

Before her recent retirement, UA thought she could pass the remaining years of her career in relative calm. But this was not to be. She was excessed for the second time in her career and was for a year and a half a sub, or in the vernacular, an ATR. A successful grievance restored her to a position, but a principal has many ways to keep someone squirming. Teaching fully out of license was one of them, during which time she lost her desire to teach at all.

It is very hard to tell whether she was excessed in that period because her subject is music (which is not particularly respected in this school system), or because she was becoming too old, too expensive, or too ... "vocal."

RESOURCES

September 2, 2026

Coverage by cartel