Ed Nathanson
Washington D.C.
My interests as a policy analyst are health care services and cost controls for medical care.
No corporation can claim a more vital role in passing and starting to implement the health care reform law than WellPoint, which has a larger customer base than any other health insurer in the United States. This is not to say that WellPoint supported health reform; quite the opposite. But as President Obama's May 8 radio address demonstrated not for the first time. WellPoint is uniquely maladroit and a corporate heavy. If it didn't exist, Obama might have had to invent it.
"[W]hen we found out that an insurance company was systematically dropping the coverage of women diagnosed with breast cancer," Obama said in the address, "my administration called on them to end this practice immediately." The company went unnamed, but it was WellPoint, and the news was broken by Reuters in a news story by Murray Waas, an investigative reporter. Waas reported that WellPoint
was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted … every … policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.