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 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 companywas systematically dropping the coverageof 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 story was was broken by Reuters in an April 22 news story by Murray Waas, an investigative reporter who also happens to be a cancer survivor.