Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Daniel Altman's column appears alternate Mondays...
Soon they might have that chance. This week Kramer is in Hollywood to begin work with Barbra Streisand on her long-deferred film of his AIDS play The Normal Heart. Robert Altman will direct the Angels in America film. The independent Propaganda Films is developing two projects: Good Days, a gay coming-of-age story from John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday); and, with Oliver Stone and HBO, an adaptation of Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On). "Nothing takes the taboo off of anything in Hollywood like box office," says Propaganda's boss Steve Golin...
Like Clinton, Moynihan wants a system that provides universal coverage, a scheme that will guarantee quality health care regardless of a person's income or employment status. The question is how to pay for it. "The linchpin is the employer mandate," says Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. "Without it you can't have universal coverage." Put simply, the Administration would force most employers to pay 80% of the cost of health insurance premiums. Workers would cover the rest. But small companies, and an increasing number of medium and large ones, contend that such mandates could bankrupt them. In an attempt...
...envision any wide-scale switch away from full-time workers," counters Altman, "and trying to game the system by making full-timers independent contractors won't work. If you get 80% of your income from a single source, you can't qualify as an independent contractor under IRS rules, so you'd be covered for health care by the employer mandate." Yes, says Senate Finance Committee chief of staff Lawrence O'Donnell, "the IRS forbids tax dodging of any kind -- but taxes are avoided just the same. The Administration thinks its health plan outfoxes every conniving operator out there...
Built as they are almost entirely from dialogue, the novels of William Gaddis are like those scenes in a Robert Altman movie where everyone talks over everyone else while each tongue is tripping on itself. For A Frolic of His Own (Poseidon Press; 586 pages; $25), Gaddis practically rebuilds the Tower of Babel from the sounds and furies of the late 20th century. Drunken soliloquies, air-brained chatter and large, heavy blocks of legal gibberish are piled atop one another. One character is haunted by the thought that "reality may not exist at all except in the words in which...