mike jessup

Among my many interests:

No corporation can claim a more vital role in passing the health care reform law than WellPoint. This is not to say that WellPoint supported health refor,/ But as President Obama's radio address demonstrated, WellPoint is a uniquely maladroit corporate heavy. If it didn't exist, Obama might have had to invent it.

"[W]e 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 stop immediately." The company went unnamed, but it was WellPoint, and news of the practice was broken by Reuters in a news story by Murray Waas. Murray 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.