Consumer Watchdog in Middle of Fight for Insurance Rate Regulation
by Brian Leubitz
Consumer Watchdog (CW) has more than its share of enemies. While most normal Californians have very little idea who they are, the denizens of the Capitol are not really normal, are they? They have a pretty good idea of who they are.
They have enemies from the 2007 health care fight, where California ended up with no health care reform package, partly because the left didn't want to be complicit with Gov. Schwarzenegger's plan. You see, fellow progressives, we are supposed to stand by while the "adults" do all the negotiating and then cheer when we get some scraps. By adults I mean, the corporate right, the Tea Party, and the center-right Democrats. So, you know, "serious" people.
It turns out that when CW helped out with blowing up that 2007 process, there were some hard feelings. And these things linger in Sacramento. Of course, for Consumer Watchdog, it is hardly the first time they've pissed anybody off.
Fast forward to this year, when AB 52, health insurance rate regulation is up in the Senate. It ultimately fails, and Sen. Ed Hernandez, the chair of the Healthcare committee that ultimately passes it to the full Senate, catches some flack. Hernandez didn't ultimately support the bill in the full Senate, or at least he has said as much. Consumer Watchdog then proceeded to put out a TV spot attacking Sen. Hernandez.
The spot was pretty hardhitting, and Asm. Feuer and IC Dave Jones have distanced themselves from it. However, what is interesting now is that the focus doesn't seem to be on the issue itself anymore, but rather that vague sense of transparency. You see, like the Chamber of Commerce and other organizations, CW keeps some of their contributors private.
Thornier than the fees is the disclosure of individual donors who fund Consumer Watchdog, It is widely believed - and some within Consumer Watchdog have confirmed it over the years - that much of its money comes from the trial bar. The group receives individual donations from the public, money from foundations, money from settlements that go into affiliated foundations for education and outreach that provide money to the main group and money from labor and other groups.
But individually, just who gives what is not available, Court said, "the donors can get harassed by politicians because people like us run ads about their (the politicians') conflict of interest," he said. He said nondisclosure as a civil rights tool, much as nondisclosure was important to the NAACP to protect its donors.
But critics of Consumer Watchdog are not convinced, saying the group is hypocritical for not disclosing donors while demanding full disclosure from those it attacks.(Capitol Weekly)
Or, in other words, you can't advocate for good government unless you are a perfect teacher's pet. But if you are advocating for giveaways to corporations? Well, no need to tell us who you are working for. We sure they are all just "job creators" trying to ...ummm...exploit labor to increase their own capital or something like that. But hey, it's capitalism...so that's awesome!
Do we need some control over the funding of political? Yes, desperately. But the Left can't be forced to give up the tools and play on a different playing field as the Right.
Insurer trying to pass measure previously defeated last June
by Brian Leubitz
I'm not sure what Mercury Insurance Chairman George Joseph thinks will be more in his favor come next November, but he's looking to qualify a measure stunningly similar to last year's loser, Prop 17. Today Joseph was revealed as having donated over $8mil towards qualifying Prop 17's virtual clone.
The current proposal, like Proposition 17, would repeal Proposition 103's ban on considering a driver's insurance coverage history when setting rates and premiums. It would allow insurers to surcharge customers who had not purchased auto insurance at some point during the past five years, whether or not they had been driving. Consumer Watchdog estimates that those surcharges would increase premiums by as much as 40% or more for millions of Californians including students who went away for college, Californians who previously used mass-transit, and the long-term unemployed.
It was a bad idea in 2010, and it is a bad idea in 2012. While June 2012 might seem an inviting target for ambitious corporatisits, that is a risky gambit considering the legislation on the Governor's desk that would restore all future signature driven measures to the general election ballot. November 2012 will not really be the opportunity to pass already-rejected crap, but it looks like Mercury Insurance will take that bet.
Because, they want to save you money, don't you know?!?
Insurance Industry Kills Bill That Would Have Forced them to Justify Hikes
by Brian Leubitz
Well, score another win for the insurance industry over consumers:
Feuer: "We've hit a temporary roadblock on the bill. The bill remains on the floor of the Senate, however, and I'm going to work very hard between now and next January to change this dynamic."
Health insurance companies and business groups have fought the measure fiercely. The California Association of Health Plans says the bill would sharply increase costs to the state - without doing anything to lower the cost of health care. (Cap Public Radio)
Of course they say it would increase rates, because they can. Not because they have any data to show that is true. Not because rates in states that have similar measures are higher, but because they can.
However unfortunate, there are enough anti-consumer Democrats to kill the bill. Let's be clear here, this is nothing about being moderate. This is about insurance industry contributions controlling several Democrats in Senate, to the detriment of their constituents.
The bill will be back in next year's session, by then we can hope that these as yet unnamed legislative cowards can be convinced of the error of their ways. We need leaders who will stand up for California consumers, rather than just bending to the will of AHIP.
Tennis fans were riled by our drive-by and fly-by mobile advertisements at the finals of Mercury Insurance Open in Carlsbad yesterday. Our message: "Don't Trust Mercury Insurance." You can watch a short video here, which explains why students are getting involved against Mercury.
Last week, I had a brief chance to speak with Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, and before he and I had to attend to other matters, he briefly stressed the importance of AB-52's pre-increase rate regulation. The first thing that you have to consider, of course, is that AB 52 would greatly expand the Insurance Commissioner's power. Now, Jones has been pushing the bill even when Poizner was calling the shots, so there must be something else.
That something else is the poor division between the Department of Insurance, which Jones heads, and the several other departments in the executive branch that manage health insurance. When it comes down to it, the elected Commissioner, under the current system, actually has relatively little power in that whole process. AB 52, at its core, is a simple regulation that would give the Dept. of Insurance the power to block unreasonable rate increases.
For an industry that has some rather unclean hands, it unsurprisingly fighting this tooth and nail. It is a majority vote measure, so they must rely on a few Democrats to hold up the process.
Tomorrow's vote is the Senate Health Committee, and under normal circumstances, with two co-authors of the bill on the committee, would likely get at least a party line vote. But these are hardly normal circumstances, and many of these Democratic Senators have a insurance money habit that is quite hard to break. nyceve has a diary up at dKos with the names and numbers of the Senators on the Committee, which you can also find below the fold. If I had to prioritize my calls, I would go Hernandez, Alquist, Rubio, de Leon, Wolk, DeSaulnier, in that order. But, if you are a constituent of any of these Senators, please, please call them right away.
There will be more work to go to get this through the Senate, and then pressuring the Governor to sign it. However, this important first step should not be neglected. Get those phone calls in as soon as possible.
Health insurance companies aren't the only ones that raked in the dough as insurance premiums rose 138% over the last decade. Health insurance brokers, who get their pay as sales commissions from insurance companies, made out like bandits, too. A recent California Department of Insurance survey of four of the five top insurers in the state found that aggregate broker income rose from from $5.8 million in 2000 to $168 million in 2010--a 2800% increase. Some of that is growth of the broker industry as insurance became a for-profit product, but a lot of it is also broker pay rising along with premiums.
by California Labor Federation Policy Coordinator Sara Flocks
I have a friend, Patty, who worked as a waitress to pay her way through college. She worked hard and studied hard, so when she got sick and couldn’t get better, she just chalked it up to stress. For two years, Patty was chronically ill with mysterious and debilitating symptoms. She knew she should go to the doctor, but she didn’t have health insurance through work, and she couldn’t afford to buy insurance and pay for rent and tuition at the same time. So she never went to the doctor. Eventually, Patty ended up in the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a thyroid problem. Since she had not gotten care for so long she had to immediately have surgery, which left her with $10,000 in medical debt.
Patty is just one of the 8.4 million Californians who lack health insurance. Californians who don’t have job-based insurance are left to purchase coverage on their own in the individual market—a maze of complicated and overwhelming options hawked by giant health insurance corporations that know how to make a profit. The high cost of health coverage drives many people like Patty into the ranks of the uninsured, because they just can’t afford to buy insurance and pay rent at the same time.
Patty didn’t have health insurance. But even if she did, the rate increases proposed by Blue Shield would have priced her right out of the market. A recent report states that Blue Shield is proposing insurance premium increases as high as 86.5 percent for some policy holders and 45,500 customers will see increases over 50 percent. The total includes three rate increases in the last six months, from October, January and now another one pending in May.
Policy holders were already understandably upset over Blue Shield’s proposed 59 percent increases —so why did that figure jump to 86.5 percent? Turns out, when Blue Shield originally said 59 percent, they neglected to include the October increase in the totals—they only included the two from 2011. Oops, sorry!
Reasonable? Really? Reasonable for whom? I’m sure Blue Shield thinks its ‘reasonable’ to jack up prices during a recession when millions of Californians have lost their jobs, their homes and their savings. But I doubt that the 200,000 Blue Shield policy holders find the increase ‘reasonable.’ I doubt the people who will no longer be able to afford health care and can’t take their kids to the doctor find it ‘reasonable.’ And I highly doubt that the millions of uninsured like Patty find it ‘reasonable’ that even when they work hard at their jobs every day, they will never be able to afford to buy health insurance.
Well, it's been just over a week since the end of the Steve Poizner era at the Insurance Commissioner's office, and it didn't take long to see the changes. Right of the gate, Jones has come out fighting the massive insurance premium hikes:
Commissioner Dave Jones has already urged Blue Shield of California to refrain from raising rates for the third time in five months. The increases would drive up consumers' bills as much as 59% cumulatively.
On Tuesday, Jones notified Aetna Inc., Anthem Blue Cross and PacifiCare that he also is focusing on them. The insurers did not respond immediately to Jones' request. (LA Times)
While Poizner never officially took insurance company money for the gig, it did manage to find its way into his ballot measure accounts. Pretty funny how that goes. And while he did occasionally go after the massive increases, his policy against them was more talk than anything else. I think there are a lot of California consumers that would like to see a little more action from Jones than his predecessor. Knowing Dave Jones, I'd be shocked if we didn't see just that.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal featured an article about student health plans. One of the cases studied was Paula Villescaz, a student at Berkeley and somebody that I have met through my participation in the California Young Democrats. She has been involved with CYD and the College Democrats for a while now, and has really been a rock star of involvement.
Unfortunately, as outlined in the article, when she got sick and actually needed health coverage, Berkeley's student health plan failed her.
Paula Villescaz, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, says she never looked closely at the Anthem Blue Cross insurance policy she got through her college. The plan has a $400,000 ceiling, but also has some important limitations, as Ms. Villescaz found out recently.
The political-science major had always been healthy-until March, when doctors discovered she had Ewing's Sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Berkeley's plan didn't cover her first MRI, her PET scan or many blood tests her doctors required, she says.
In between chemotherapy treatments, Ms. Villescaz says she had to battle the insurance company, which refused to cover her last round of chemotherapy, declaring it medically unnecessary. Her chemotherapy has since concluded, but she is now undergoing radiation treatment.
Ms. Villescaz says she owes about $80,000 all told. Before she got sick, she worked two jobs to support herself and help out her single mother. "I'm going to be paying off these bills for the rest of my life," she says. (Wall Street Journal)
If anything shows the failing of our medical system, this is surely it. Paula played by the rules. She bought health insurance from her university. She had a right to expect that the coverage would be sufficient if she had a major medical incident. Instead, due to drawing the short straw, she is saddled with an enormous debt before she even has started her career.
And this is at the heart of the flaw in our health care system. Even if you do everything right, you still cannot rest easy. The solution is to take health care and/or health care insurance out of the for-profit world. Single payer would prevent these unfortunate consequences of the health industrial complex, and would serve our state, and our nation, far better than the system that we have now.
Interestingly, as highlighted by David Dayen at FDL News, a recent Pew poll shows that 40% of Americans think that the health care bill didn't go far enough.
The poll found that about four in 10 adults think the new law did not go far enough to change the health care system, regardless of whether they support the law, oppose it or remain neutral. On the other side, about one in five say they oppose the law because they think the federal government should not be involved in health care at all. (AP)
It turns out that sometimes people want something they can really believe in. The monster that emerged from the Senate is certainly likely to improve the situation, but it isn't the end game in any way shape or form. We have a lot of work to do before we can actually call our health care system a success.
But returning to Berkeley, I was on the same plan that Paula was on while I was getting my graduate degree in public policy. Over the course of my four semesters there, the cost increased over 25%. It was still more affordable than many of the individual plans I could find, but it was far from a good solution. The University fails us by not fighting harder for their students, and ensuring that the health care plan they are pitching to students will work for them. And Anthem? Well, Anthem has made failing Californians an art form.
This failure hurts not just our students, but the future of California. Setting our students for a lifetime of economic burden is hardly a recipe for long-term success.
Mercury Insurance is in the process of submitting its signatures to place a deceptive measure on the June or November ballot that would raise insurance premiums on California drivers. This is another one of those initiatives funded entirely by a self-serving company (all $4.5 million to the campaign come from Mercury) that will use its endless amount of money to try and trick voters into paying more for car insurance.
The measure would allow Mercury and every other insurer to penalize Californians who want car insurance but have had a lapse in coverage anytime in the past five years. The penalty, which would amount to hundreds of dollars, would be imposed whether or not the person was driving when they didn't have insurance. (Can you even buy car insurance if you don't have a car?)
In the wake of this nasty recession, there are too many people who will face a major penalty when they try to get back on their feet and into their car (and the insurance market), if this passes. Some of the types of folks to face Mercury's car insurance surcharge are:
*A senior citizen who stops driving for several months after surgery would be penalized when she tries to restart insurance coverage.
*A soldier serving on base in the United States would be penalized when he returns to civilian life in California and needs auto insurance again.
*A family whose coverage was canceled after missing just one auto insurance payment would be penalized even if they tried to restart coverage immediately after they were canceled.
*Anyone who gives up driving for public transportation or to bike to work would be penalized when they need a car and insurance again.
As Iraq War veteran Jon Soltz of VoteVets.org said: “Penalizing troops with higher rates while in service to their country is beyond the pale. I don't understand why an insurance company should be allowed to charge service members higher auto insurance premiums just because they may have decided that they didn't need a car while living on base. There’s something wrong with an initiative on the ballot that says that it’s ok to surcharge our troops and I hope Californians feel the same way.”
When millions of Californians are penalized when they try to buy auto insurance, the number of uninsured motorists on California roads will go up and everyone’s premiums will increase as a result.
In pressing for this initiative, Mercury is launching a deceptive campaign meant to hide the proposal's inherent attack on families struggling in these tough times. When the California Court of Appeal invalidated a virtually identical 2003 Mercury-sponsored law, the Court, citing the Department of Insurance's senior actuary, ruled that Mercury's proposal “would result in a surcharge equal to a 40 percent increase in premium for…policyholders who do not qualify for the 'continuous insurance' discount.”
Dr. Ami Bera approaches health care as one would expect of a doctor; with compassion and a desire to make well.
"I trained to be a physician to take care of people," he says. It's an attitude he will carry with him when we elect him to congress. Compassion, caring, a person centered approach to solving the very significant issues facing the American people is what we will get with Ami Bera.
"Health care is not a lottery," Bera told a group of about 50 people gathered in Rancho Cordova to hear his views on health care. But some people want to treat it that way. Health insurance is the ticket. If you have one, maybe you win something. If you don't - well, you don't.
Calitics doesn't allow my CSS formatting code for photos and text. Read the rest at California Notes.
As a person whose economic life was ruined 23 years ago at age 23, when I got a lupus diagnosis and lost my health insurance, I know I'm only alive thanks to government health care--and charity, which has so far kept me from dying of the poverty I have to stay in to GET the government health care.
House HELP Passes Amendment to Allow State Single-Payer Experimentation
America's registered nurses and other guaranteed healthcare activists are hailing the vote last night by House Education and Labor Committee to amend the national healthcare reform bill and give individual states the freedom to adopt single-payer, Medicare-for-All style reforms.
This bi-partisan vote affirms the best of American democracy. The exemptions would life federal mandates on healthcare money and free states to act as the laboratories of democracy they are supposed to. The vote is also an encouragement to progressives who are looking for paths to improve the parameters of the healthcare debate.
In a stunning show of fealty to insurance giant Safeco, 14 Republican state Senators and 11 Assemblymembers have asked the California Supreme Court to overturn an appellate ruling that Safeco Insurance has to disclose the names of policyholders it may have cheated.
Considering that state lawmakers are supposed to be spending their time grappling with the disastrous state budget, it must be very important to these lawmakers to protect Safeco from accountability for overcharging Californians, including, no doubt, folks in their district. Who do they think are their constituents?... O' Safeco, how can we serve you?
The Senators who signed the letter are, pictured from left to right, Sen. Cogdil, Sen. Aanasted, Sen. Benoit, Sen. Ashburn, Sen. Cox and Sen. Hollingsworth, as well as Senators Denham, Dutton, Harman, Huff, Runner, Strickland, Walters and Wyland (Maldonado is the only Republican Senator not to sign). Also signing were Assemblymembers Smyth, Tran, Strickland, Silva, Fletcher, Berryhill, Garrick, Gilmore, Fuller, Anderson and Logue.
The tradition of brave and proud nurse activism for guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model continued today thanks to Janice Webb, RN, and her nurse intervention at the convention of the health insurance industry in San Diego, AHIP. They're the lobbyists for the insurance giants who make money by denying care to the very patients that Janice cares for at UC-San Diego Medical Center.
With the final White House Forum on healthcare scheduled Monday, April 6 in downtown Los Angeles, advocates of single payer/guaranteed healthcare have one more opportunity to shake up what has become a dreary conventional wisdom about the presumed acceptable parameters of the debate.
Hundreds of nurses, doctors, healthcare and labor activists will rally at 9 a.m. outside the California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda St., Los Angeles.
It will mark the fifth time, at all five White House regional forums, that the single payer/Medicare for all message will come to the stage, outside and inside the forum. You can extend that to the town hall meeting at the White House last week where the President was asked why we can't have a national healthcare system like they have in other industrialized nations.
In a sign of the growing health care crisis in California, the number of health insurance policies offering maternity benefits - from pre-natal screenings to birth - has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the aftermath of the failure of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Year of Health Care Reform" in 2007 all sides agreed to pursue greater regulation of the insurance industry as a stopgap before a broader solution was reached. And yet Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill that would have mandated insurance plans cover maternity.
About 805,000 Californians have insurance policies that specifically exclude maternity coverage - a number that has more than quadrupled from 192,000 in 2004, according to the California Health Benefits Review Program, which provides independent analysis of proposed health insurance benefits mandates.
"You see this tremendous jump in just a few years. That's where we're going with this," said Assemblyman Hector De La Torre, D-South Gate (Los Angeles County), whose bill to require maternity coverage is headed to the Assembly Health Committee today. Insurance companies are "pushing these policies clearly onto people, and people are making their decisions based solely on dollars and cents."
De La Torre's bill, AB 98, would solve this problem. But Arnold has repeatedly vetoed the bill, including one by then-State Senator Jackie Speier in 2004.
The failure of insurance companies to provide these basic benefits is especially acute here in Monterey County. The Chronicle article linked above profiled Wendy Root Askew, a good friend of mine, whose experience typifies the problem that results from insurers' refusal to provide basic maternity benefits:
When Wendy Root Askew of Monterey started looking for a doctor she hoped would be her gynecologist as well as deliver her future children, she was shocked to discover her health insurance policy didn't include a single OB/GYN in her county.
The 31-year-old considered changing health plans. But then she learned that while 85 percent of the plans available in Monterey County offered maternity coverage five years ago, just 15 percent offer it now.
She found only two individual policies that included maternity, but they were three to five times as much as the policy she already had and came with annual deductibles of up to $15,000.
What the insurers that oppose AB 98 claim is that if a woman gets pregnant, she can purchase maternity benefits for an "additional sum". Insurers claim this amount is small, but as Wendy found it is anything but small - it can be as much as five times the monthly cost of existing health insurance. A $15,000 deductible is essentially punishing women for getting pregnant, a stunning example of gender bias and inequality in an insurance system where prostate exams are routinely covered by basic plans.
Some insurers, and Republican opponents of AB 98 like Audra Strickland, claim that it would cost all Californians more money to mandate maternity benefits be included in all health insurance policies. And while that might mean a whopping average increase of $7 per month per policy (oh noez!) for Californians, the savings are actually much larger. Numerous studies show that proper prenatal care is vital to the long-term health of a child. By spending a little more per month to ensure all insurance policies provide expectant mothers with maternity benefits, we will be saving a far larger sum when their children turn out to be healthier.
Strickland in particular argues that it's a matter of choice - if women want to get pregnant, they should choose to pay the extra cost. This is absurd on its face. By segmenting high-cost risks out of the insurance "market" you're also actually undermining the entire system of insurance. Insurance is supposed to work by pooling the cost of risk, making it cheaper for everyone to get health care. By dumping the costs of pregnancy onto a small handful of people, health care costs actually soar, public health is undermined, and insurance as a system will go from a state of near-collapse to total collapse.
In reality Strickland, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, are arguing that the only "choice" here is whether one accepts that unless you're wealthy or lucky enough to still have a job with group coverage, you're going to not be able to afford to have a child. It's typical conservatism - the rich can afford the basics of life, and who cares about those who cannot?
There is no plausible reason to oppose AB 98, and certainly no reason for Arnold Schwarzenegger to again veto the bill, unless he believes that society has no obligation at all to ensure that mothers and their children are healthy. And while AB 98 won't solve the health care crisis itself - and it's surely no substitute for true universal health care - it is a sensible and necessary move to provide gender equity and basic health care to mothers and children.
Over the flip is Wendy Root Askew's testimony given to an Assembly committee on AB 98 last week.
Haven't we heard this song before? It sure looks like the people who already control our healthcare system are framing the biggest issues of the present healthcare reform debate.
From the back rooms to the committee hearings to the White House summits to the front pages of the newspapers, the demands of the insurance industry are given enormous deference and accommodation.
Is it fear of Harry and Louise, the insurance campaign that some believe torpedoed the muddled Clinton health proposal? Is it the considerable influence of insurance industry contributions in the pockets of many legislators?
Considering that state lawmakers are supposed to be spending their time grappling with the disastrous state budget, it must be very important to these lawmakers to protect Safeco from accountability for overcharging Californians, including, no doubt, folks in their district. Who do they think are their constituents?... O' Safeco, how can we serve you?