AHIP: Harry and Louise are back.
By Justen Deal • Jan 18th, 2008 • Category: healthcare
Fifteen years ago, America had a long discussion about how to implement universal healthcare coverage. The proposal developed by Hillary Clinton, dubbed Hillarycare by its critics, certainly had its weaknesses, but the nuclear weapon that annihilated not only her proposal, but the entire discussion itself — and ensured the topic wouldn’t come up again for more than a decade — was a television commercial, Harry and Louise.
The folks behind that commercial, the Health Insurance Association of America, have a new, somehow more patriotic name these days: America’s Health Insurance Plans. Their chairman happens to be George Halvorson. And they issued a press release today calling for state governments to “enforce the requirement to purchase and maintain coverage” from its health plans, and, better yet, “establish an automatic enrollment process” of “every citizen in the state” into an AHIP health plan.
Let me get this straight: HIAA was against managed competition, but its successor, AHIP is very much for mandated coverage.
AHIP is also “proposing” the possibility that its plans might move towards “limiting” pre-existing condition exclusions and consider the idea of having an “objective” third-party review rescission decisions (you know, rescission, that practice where the unobjective HMO retroactively and illegally cancels the health plan of patients who become too costly). Of course, those proposals hinge on states requiring all individuals purchase and pay for unaffordable health coverage, so the health plans don’t have to worry about having to deal with any pesky “objective” rescission decision-making and costly pre-existing-condition applicants just yet.
Mr. Halvorson gave a somewhat unconvincing quote in regards to these proposals: “We are committed to working with legislators and other stakeholders to identify policy solutions to the health care challenges facing our nation,” he said. Of course, they’re really only committed to anything if those “policy solutions” result in profit windfalls for AHIP’s health plans. I guess Mr. Halvorson will be inviting Harry and Louise over to help with the work?
To join the fight to stop AHIP and George Halvorson’s plan to require that all Californians (and, now, Americans) pay for unaffordable “universal” health care — a plan that will only help buoy HMO’s profits and pad HMO executive’s wallets — visit the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights.
Justen Deal is a twenty-something business consultant based in Montréal, Québec; Charleston, West Virginia; and Los Angeles, California. He has been featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
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Justen,
Brilliant observations in this and the prior post. It is now clear that an important aspect of the KP and Halvorson saga is that of an experiment in altering the administration of medical care and all of the patients whose care is directed by Health Connect are subjects in this research. The doctors and nurses are parties to this experiment. Did the patients sign consent? Did the KP IRB approve? Is KP accumulating data from this research and will they publish it? Have the conflicts of interest been disclosed? Have they already published any results? Without IRB approval and informed consent, this Health Connect research may be illegal as determined by Federal laws to protect human subjects. Perhaps you and others should file a complaint with Dr. Kristina Borror of the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) , as well as with the FDA. This may result in scrutiny of KP and other profiteering hospital megacorporations who may be using humans as guinea pigs without their consent in these care altering health it and CPOE reearch programs.
Best regards.
Menoalittle