Sam Kerrigan

Sam Kerrigan is a former staff attorney for a member of Congress who advised on consumer issues says as banking and insurance.

No corporation can claim a more vital role in passing and starting to implement the health care reform law than WellPoint, which is the largest health insurance company in the U.S.. As President Obama's May 8 radio address demonstrated not for the first time, WellPoint is a uniquely maladroit 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, "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, an investigative reporter who also happens to be a cancer survivor. Murray Waas reported that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted … every … policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer."