Steve Claridge

I work every day to make universal health care a reality and to end inequities in care: The chances of living a long and healthy life differ dramatically for the rich and poor. How might such inequality be reduced? The long-standing debates on health care reform in the United States address such possibilities as providing universal access to health insurance.

No corporation can claim a more vital role in passing and starting to implement the health care reform law than WellPoint, which has more customers 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 demonstrated not for the first time, WellPoint is a uniquely maladroit corporate heavy.

"[W]hen we found out that an insurance company was systematically dropping the coverage of women diagnosed with breast cancer... my administration called on them to end this practice 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.