Word: gagged
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...just blue-collar employees who are expected to check their freedom of speech at the company door. In mid-December, Boston physician David Himmelstein was fired for going public about the gag clause in his employer's contract with doctors, forbidding them to "make any communication which undermines or could undermine the confidence...of the public in U.S. Healthcare..." or even revealing that this clause is in their contract...
...Since the formula is so familiar, they know the trick is to tweak it. Remember Too Beautiful for You, where Gerard Depardieu spurns gorgeous wife Carole Bouquet for dumpy secretary Josiane Balasko? This time writing and directing as well as starring, Balasko has wrung another variation on the old gag. Husband, wife, lesbian interloper. French Twist...
Last November, at a meeting of the National Managed Health Care Congress, Himmelstein gave a presentation during which he showed slides of, among other things, what he called the "gag clause" in his U.S. Healthcare contract. Two weeks later, he took his complaints to the Donahue show and said, "one of the HMOs that I practice in tells me I can't tell my patients if there's something wrong [with what] the HMO insists...
What was the "gag clause" that drew Himmelstein's ire? In his U.S. Healthcare contract he found the following: "Physicians shall agree not to take any action or make any communication which undermines or could undermine the confidence of enrollees, potential enrollees, their employers, their unions, or the public in U.S. Healthcare or the quality of U.S. Healthcare coverage." A further proviso stipulated that "physicians shall keep the Proprietary Information and this Agreement strictly confidential." Himmelstein says he found the whole restriction "so obnoxious I crossed it out" before signing. The emended contract was accepted without complaint...
...plot heavy. But as a live act, Martin and Lewis were awesome. Their appearances on NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour made the viewer a co-conspirator in their anarchy; they broke the "fourth wall" as blithely as if it were a cardboard prop, and incorporated their famous arguments into gag lyrics for their duets. They worked literally nose to nose: Jerry would lick Dean's face; Dean would flick his cigarette ashes in Jerry's mouth (and lick Jer's face). It was primal therapy on the 12-inch screen, stripping bare a volatile marriage in all its grotesque intimacy...