WTF, WellPoint?

by Tim Foley

category: Enemies of Reform

Published April 24, 2009 @ 08:47PM PT

“I think, on behalf of our entire membership, they would want to be able to say to you this afternoon and everyone here that we understand we have to earn a seat at the table.”  Those were the words of Karen Ignagni, president of the private insurance trade association AHIP, at President Obama’s White House Summit.  Apparently Angela Braly, President of WellPoint, didn’t get the memo.  WellPoint, which goes by “Anthem Blue Cross” in California, was the only insurance company to spend millions of dollars to defeat Gov. Schwarzenegger’s health care plan a few years back.  Looks like they’re taking their anti-reform efforts to the big leagues.

This isn’t the first clear attempt by an insurer to resist the president’s agenda – a consulting group was hired by AHIP to defend Medicare Advantage with letters to the editor from fictional people – but it’s the first to focus on the push for universal health care.  Let’s just review their track record of fighting health care reform in California.  Every other health insurance company either remained neutral or vaguely supportive, but WellPoint was armed to the teeth.  Their main objections were “the guaranteed issue requirement and the minimum benefit standards” – two of the major regulations in the Obama plan as well.  As Anthem Blue is also the largest insurer in California, they made a strong ally for the business interests who helped sink the California plan, spending $2 million in the fight.  Mission accomplished.

So now, with a nationwide focus on health care, Angela Braly has opted to kick WellPoint's anti-reform efforts into the next gear.  And what gets people more upset than dealing with insurance companies?  That’s right – telemarketers!  As reported by the Sacramento Bee, they “made 3 million computer-generated phone calls last week to gauge the public's appetite for overhauling health care – and to enlist, critics say, a grass-roots army to voice concerns about the sweeping proposals developing on Capitol Hill.”  Gauging the public’s appetite, eh?  Convening people for WellPoint-sponsored town halls, eh?  What, I wonder, is the rationale?  “The public is not always well informed," one of the company’s VPs said to the Bee.

Really?  Seems to me it’s the opposite problem.  Too much of the public is well-informed.  Too many people see WellPoint for what it is -- a company who saw its profits jump 34% in 2006 (over $600 million in California alone), saw Braly earn $14 million in compensation in 2007, and yet whose premiums shockingly jumped 30-40% for most of its customers on individual plans this year.  They see a company for whom $2 million to defeat health care reform is nothing, and the cost of 3 million calls even less.  They see a company who has already been fined millions of dollars for their unfair claims denial processes again, and again, and again.  An insurer so frustrating and deadly that it inspired this cartoon, based on Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

Yet WellPoint thinks it can be the trusted source of information to consumers about health care?  Really?

So here’s my suggestion.  They want to listen to a “grassroots army”?  Let’s give them what they want.   Write to Angela Braly, president of WellPoint, and tell her to stop spending money defeating health care reform and start spending money on better care for her customers.