Defeat of California initiative would protect insurers' profits
For the next two months, Californians will to be subjected to a barrage of TV, radio and online ads, which, ironically, they unknowingly will be paying for with their health insurance premiums.
The ads are a part of a multi-pronged, multimillion dollar campaign — developed by public relations, advertising firms and political consultants for the state’s biggest insurers — to convince voters that an initiative on the Nov. 4 ballot designed to protect them against unreasonable rate increases will actually cause their premiums to go up.
As of last week, a small handful of health insurers had contributed tens of millions of dollars to an organization called Californians Against Higher Health Care Costs. If you think the companies’ CEOs opened their personal checkbooks to finance that group’s work, think again. It is their customers that are paying for the propaganda campaign.
Californians Against Higher Health Care Costs (CAHHCC) is not a grassroots, consumer-led organization as the name implies. If you check out its website, you’ll read that it’s a “coalition of doctors, nurses, hospitals, health plans, and California employers” who want the state’s residents to vote against Proposition 45, which would give the state’s insurance regulators the ability to reject health insurance rate increases they deem excessive.
But while a number of business and health care provider groups presumably have joined the coalition, it doesn’t appear that any of them have put any money on the table. According to state filings, the campaign is being financed almost exclusively by five insurers with the most customers in the state: Anthem/WellPoint; Blue Shield of California; Kaiser Foundation Health Plan; Health Net; and UnitedHealthcare.
Of $37.9 million donated to CAHHCC as of August 22, $37.3 million came from those insurers and their PR and lobbying group, the California Association of Health Plans. The rest came from a small group of insurance brokers and their PR and lobbying groups, the California Association of Health Underwriters and the National Association of Health Underwriters.
The main argument cited by these groups’ opposition to Proposition 45 is that it might interfere with the efforts of Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, to provide individuals and small businesses with affordable coverage options in a timely fashion.
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Wendell Potter. Former CIGNA executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter writes about the health care industry and the ongoing battle for health reform. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
