California Attorney General Called To Investigate Insurance Companies’ Anti-Health Reform Advocacy

The Los Angeles Times reported today that the California-based Consumer Watchdog has submitted a letter to Attorney General Jerry Brown calling for an investigation of insurance giants Wellpoint and United HealthCare (UHC). The complaint comes in response to the insurance companies’ practice of actively encouraging employees to engage in anti-health care reform political activity. According to Consumer Watchdog, "while coercive communications with employees may be legal, if abhorrent, in most states, California’s Labor Code appears to directly prohibit them."

Read the rest at Think Progress

WellPoint Calls Attention To Its Own Immoral Practices In Effort To Smear Health Reform

For-profit health insurance giant WellPoint fired off an email blast to its customers (using its Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield subsidiary) yesterday attacking the public option and Democratic plans for reforming health care, according to Politico’s Ben Smith. The email directs customers to its “grassroots Web site” for instructions on contacting legislators, a website ThinkProgress revealed to be run by the secretive corporate lobbying firm Democracy Data and Communications (DDC). DDC, which is operated by a former veteran of the astroturf organization now known as FreedomWorks, has helped various corporate and Republican interests shape legislation by helping to generate seemingly organic phone calls and letters to Congress.

Read it all at Think Progress

Health Insurance Lobby’s Stealth Astroturf Campaign Revealed! | Health and Wellness | AlterNet

by Lee Fang

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that AHIP — the multimillion dollar lobbying juggernaut for the health insurance industry — has mobilized 50,000 employees to lobby Congress to defeat the public option. ThinkProgress has learned that AHIP’s grassroots lobbying is being managed by the corporate consulting firm Democracy Data & Communications. DDC has made a name for itself as one of the most effective stealth lobbying firms. Earlier this summer, DDC was caught by reporters using a front group called “Citizens for a Safe Alexandria” to attack the Obama administration for seeking to prosecute Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Alexandria, VA.

According to the server-information hub Domaintools.com, the AHIP grassroots outreach website AHIPAdvocacy.org is hosted on a server owned by DDC. Though DDC conceals the hosting of its other websites using a service called DomainsByProxy, ThinkProgress has obtained a list of the domains hosted on DDC servers. A review of this data shows that DDC maintains the grassroots outreach websites for large health insurance companies, but also for big tobacco and Koch Industries:

– phillipmorrisusaactioncenter.org (Altria)

– tobaccoissues.com (Altria)

– kochpac.com (Koch Industries)

– aetnavotes.com (Aetna)

– healthactionnetwork.org (WellPoint)

– humanapartners.com (Humana)

– ahipadvocacy.org (AHIP)

DDC is a firm that promises “high impact” outreach programs to not only influence the grassroots, but “change attitudes for the long term.”

As the Washington Post explains, DDC pays over 500 contract workers to “spend much of their day telephoning people around the country and asking them to sign letters to Congress that press for legislation.” The firm helped orchestrate “grassroots” support for President Bush’s push to privatize Social Security, and helped manage online efforts for the right-wing attack group Freedom’s Watch. DDC is headed by B.R. McConnon, a former associate of Jack Abramoff’s lobbying partners, and a former employee of the Koch-funded astroturf organization known as Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Citizens for a Sound Economy — which has also received funds from private health insurers in the past and played a critical astroturf role in killing reform under Clinton — eventually split, with one wing forming Americans for Prosperity in 2003, and another forming FreedomWorks in 2004. Both organizations, which are still funded by the Koch Industries empire, were instrumental in organizing the anti-Obama tea party protests, and have been spreading misinformation and anger at the current health reform effort. Americans for Prosperity’s anti-health reform front group, Patients United, has hosted speakers comparing the House health reform bill to the Holocaust.

Curiously, DDC servers also host anti-health reform letters from the Chamber of Commerce and Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), as well as continual news updates about the reform debate. All three documents are under a subsection titled WellPoint.

Given the stealthy nature of astroturf lobbying firms, it is difficult to discern the extent to which DDC is managing AHIP’s efforts. UnitedHealth, another large insurer, was caught recently using a call center to direct people to a radical tea party anti-health reform protest outside of the offices of Rep. Zach Space (D-OH).

Already, the health insurance industry has flexed its muscle to water down reform. After spending millions on lobbying, advertising, and direct contributions to lawmakers, the Senate Finance Committee made a major concession allowing insurers to reimburse only 65% of medical bills (down from the 76% proposed requirement). And indeed, although AHIP has made grandiose promises of self regulation, many insurers have recently broke promises made by AHIP President Karen Ignagni. On June 16, despite Ignagni’s pledges of commitment, insurance executives from UnitedHealth Group, Assurant, and WellPoint specifically refused to “commit” to ending the controversial practice of rescinding coverage after an applicant files a medical claim.

With DDC’s stealth lobbying assistance, AHIP may well kill the public option too.

Source: AlterNet

Exposing the PR Firms Behind the Fake "Grass Roots" Anti-Healthcare Movement

Rachel Maddow exposes the Republican-funded and staffed PR firms behind the movement that's trying to disrupt town hall meetings and slow down/shout down health care reform in the U.S.

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CEO Urges Employees To Send Emails Against Health-Care Reform

Employees of Express Scripts, a St. Louis-based pharmacy benefit manager that's ranked 115 in Fortune's rankings of America's largest corporations, on Monday received an email from the firm's CEO, George Paz. Titled "Take Action: Your Voice Matters on Healthcare Reform," the email, obtained by TPMmuckraker, denounces the "rush to pass legislation that could fundamentally alter our current system without a full understanding of the costs and consequences of those changes."

It then directs employees to a company web page which allows them to send an email to members of Congress, under the heading "Concerns With Health Care Reform." That form email to lawmakers appears to come from an ordinary citizen, giving no indication that the sender works for a company that would be directly affected by reform.

Read it all at TPMMuckraker