iteeth:

Scott Nedrelow, who I’ve featured here and here, has a show with artists Eric William Carroll and Lex Thompson at Minneapolis’ Sellout Gallery, starting tonight. Nedrelow’s current work

“began as a communication with a distant friend by writing notes on torn pages from popular art publications such as Art Forum. These texts, photographed and printed in large formats (some are over 144 inches long), have morphed into abstract forms that merge and depart from the appropriated source material. The resulting work creates a new narrative of contextual distortion that questions the appropriated artist’s motivations as well as the commercialization of contemporary art.”

It’s on view through July 18.

Nedrelow is one of my favorite local artists.  Not only is he a really nice guy, but he also does work that is intellectually engaging while looking super cool.

(and it’s busy!)

Some notes on healthcare, pt. 2

As the President cranks up the heat on the issue of healthcare, we’re going to be hearing/reading/seeing more and more discussion on the current and potential options for Americans to receive healthcare coverage.

Over the next few days, we’ll post a few basic things to keep in mind whilst the gears of our discourse pulverize the topic.

We went over the broadness of some of the terms with healthcare, but what about healthcare in Minnesota?

Minnesota has a bunch of health insurance plans that do vastly different things.

Health insurance plans pay healthcare providers for services to patients.  Because there are a lot of different services and a lot of different healthcare providers and a lot of different patients, there are a wide variety of insurance plans.

For example, there are private health insurance plans that individuals can buy (you can price them at sites like MN Health Insurance Network or eHealthInsurance), and private group plans that employers can buy for employees (this is most likely what you have if you have medical and dental coverage, and why there are group #’s on your insurance cards).

Along with these different private plans of HealthPartners, UCare and Blue Cross Blue Shield, there are also public plans like Medicaid and Medicare that cover different groups of people.  (Very broadly, Medicaid pays for folks who can’t normally get health insurance because they are poor or disabled, and Medicare is for retirees.)

But here’s where it gets a little crazy: in the state of Minnesota, Medicaid is actually Minnesota Healthcare Programs, which is run through the Minnesota Department of Human Services, and MHCP itself offers different plans to different people, some of which are actually serviced through private payers like HealthPartners, UCare and BCBS.  So our state-wide public plans are serviced by private health insurance companies.

The public option for health insurance that President Obama is currently pitching fits smack dab in the middle of this complicated matrix of private and public health insurance plans.

"

It was the river that made them two—
The mills on one side,
The cathedral on the other.

We watched its swift currents:
If we stared long enough, maybe
It would stop cold and let us

Skate across to the other side.
It never froze in place—though
I once knew a kid, a wild funny

Girl who built a raft from branches
(Which promptly sank a few feet out
From the elbow bend off Dayton’s Bluff),

Who made it seem easy to believe.
We’d tried to break into Carver’s Cave,
Where bootleggers hid their hot stash

Years after the Dakota drew their snakes
And bears on the rock walls and canoed
Inside the caverns. We knew there were

Other openings in the cliffs, mirroring
Those same rock faces on the other shore—
And below them the caves, the subterranean

Pathways underlying the talk and commerce,
The big shot churches, undermining the false
Maidenliness of the convent school from which

My friend was eventually expelled for being
Too smart and standing up for her own smartness.
Too late, I salute you, Katy McNally. I think

That the river returned then to two-sidedness—
An overhung history of bottle-flash and hopelessness.
I see you still—laughing as the lashed sticks

Sank beneath you, laughing as you did
That morning when the river lifted
Its spring shoulders, shrugging off

The winter ice, that thin brittle mirage,
Making you believe
We were all in this together.