Double Dose: Wells Fargo and Alaska Regional Hospital

Neil Davis has been on the trail of some interesting, and rather peculiar, wrinkles in the State of Alaska's new AlaskaCare health plan administration. Wells Fargo Insurance Services is the current administrator of AlaskaCare for the state, and something is fishy in their new choice of preferred provider. In an early release of the June Dose of Reality, Davis describes the document that tweaked his curiosity about the recent change from a nonprofit, Providence Hospital, to a for-profit, Alaska Regional Hospital:

The reason for the change in preferred provider, the Wells Fargo document implies, is to save money. In support of that idea the document contains a table showing dramatically different costs for medical procedures undertaken at Alaska Regional Hospital and Providence Hospital, both in Anchorage. This is the fishy part: the cost figures given are so different for the two hospitals that something has to be wrong and probably purposely misleading.…Having previously looked a bit at the pricing structure and markups over cost of these two hospitals, I could not accept the idea that to be treated at Providence, on average, costs AlaskaCare members 3.4 times as much as at Alaska Regional.

Following up on this for the July Dose of Reality, Davis discovered that Wells Fargo and Alaska Regional's parent company have a long history together. And that history reveals some shady dealings:

Among the allegations that led to Columbia/HCA’s guilty plea and payment of fines were that Wells Fargo CEO Carl E. Reichardt and four other directors of Columbia/HCA were fully aware that senior management had “devised schemes to improperly increase revenue and profits, and perpetuate a management philosophy that provided strong incentives for employees to commit fraud.” Reichardt and the other four also were charged with knowing about HCA’s improper acquisition practices, which involved offering personal benefits and perquisites to hospital executives during HCA’s negotiations for the purchase of their hospitals.

Franken on medical bankruptcies

Public meeing on health care with Senator Begich

Senator Begich will be holding a forum in Fairbanks, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sept. 26, at Friends Community Church, 1485 30th Avenue. Begich has held open discussions/question-and-answer town hall meetings in Anchorage and Juneau; according to the Anchorage Daily News, they've been beyond "lively" and have gone into outright rudeness.

Begich said he's interested in what people have to say about health care reform, but is growing tired of the lies, myths and fear tactics.

"Now the media are talking about the 'swift-boating' of health reform over the recess," Begich told the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce in a lunchtime speech. He said he's seeing evidence of a political smear campaign in television ads.

Health reform protesters have been hijacking town hall meetings around the country. There's controversy over whether the dissent is real and grassroots, or a sophisticated attack intended to bring down President Obama and the health reforms he seeks.

The point of having a forum like this is to allow the public an opportunity to a) express their opinions, and b) ask questions of—and receive answers from—their representatives in government. That means that when a person is asking their question, everyone else in the audience should let them, and let them hear the answer. It's pretty basic courtesy, but some people just don't want anybody else to have their say.

Let's hope that Fairbanksans will behave like grownups, willing to let every questioner speak, and let Senator Begich answer.

Health Care for Alaskans: An "Informational" Publication

An insert with the above title (minus the weasel quotes) in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner's Sunday edition appears, at first glance, to be a special medical issues insert created by News-Miner staff. Article bylines read "Staff Report", with the exception of an article on the last page entitled "Certificate of Need hinders health care innovation," which is written by Michael Morrisey and Michael Ciamarra.* It is on the bottom of this last page, and this page alone, that a small notice reads, "Paid for by the Alliance for Healthcare in Alaska, 1275 Sadler Way, Fairbanks, AK 99701," thus revealing that the 8-page newsy-looking insert is in fact a paid advertisement. The staff "reports" are in fact opinion pieces, and are riddled with false and misleading statements.

Articles in this advertisement include:

• "Nation faces crisis due to physician shortage," which falsely claims that physician shortages "will only be exacerbated with universal health care"; and that "It is well documented that many Canadians wait an inordinate amount of time for their much-needed medical and surgical care," and "end up coming to the United States for their treatment".

• "Alaska's healthcare system locked in textbook 'monopoly'," laughably states, "It is important to understand that the health care system in America is second to none." This is flatly false, unless one is extolling its virtues as a money-making machine for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

• "Competition necessary for industry to flourish," is a summarization of a presentation by Mark J. Botti of the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice in February 2007, "Competition in Healthcare and Certificates of Need." It extolls the virtues of competition in health care and argues against the need for Certificates of Need laws.

• "Breaking down 'Certificate of Need'" (subtitled "Program designed to aid patients in health care community now contains flaws, causes more harm than good"), provides a timeline graph of the number of states with CON laws and takes the form of arguments and rebuttals on the CON issue.

• "Certificate of Need hinders health care innovation,", which describes problems in Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina's CON laws.

Quite clearly, the sponsors of this multipage advertorial want Alaska's Certificate of Need law overturned, as requested by Governor Palin (although this action was NOT recommended by the Alaska Health Care Strategies Planning Council she created to advise her). Unfortunately, the Alliance for Healthcare in Alaska appears willing to promulgate nonsense in order to do it.


*Ciamarra is vice president of the Alabama Policy Institute, a right-wing conservative think tank, described by the U of Alabama College Republicans as "the largest and most influential Conservative think tank in the state of Alabama."