enabled it “to identify and dump unprofitable corporate accounts.” 6 Aetna’s investors rewarded the company by running up the stock price. Reuter’s investigation of WellPoint revealed that the insurer used a “fuzzy logic” program to help identify policies to cancel. Health Net acknowledged that it had paid bonuses to employees who found policies the company later rescinded.
Insurers take these actions because they want to get rid of risk—policyholders who are costing them more money in claims than they had anticipated. For-profit companies are most aggressive in doing this because of the constant pressure from Wall Street to meet their earnings expectations. After acknowledging in a 2008 conference call with financial analysts that her company had spent more on medical care during the previous three months than the analysts had expected, WellPoint’s CEO, Angela Braly, promised that in the future, “we will not sacrifice profitability for membership.” WellPoint and other insurers have shown, however, that they are perfectly willing to sacrifice their members for profits.
LET THEM EAT CAKE—AND SEND THEM
TO ANIMAL STALLS WHEN THEY GET SICK
When I went back to my job at CIGNA’s corporate headquarters after my trip to Wise County, my mind was in turmoil. I was trying to process what I had seen. I talked to some of my colleagues and even showed them pictures I had taken at the expedition. I was having a very hard time finishing the health care reform document I had been assigned.
The power of my experience in Wise County really hit home a couple of weeks later as I was boarding one of the two private jets CIGNA uses to fly executives around the country. I flew on those jets several times a year. With conference tables, video screens, leather seats, and deep carpet, they make first class on a commercial airliner look shabby. As usual, on this flight, which was taking me to a meeting in Connecticut, a uniformed attendant brought me lunch on a gold-rimmed plate and handed me gold-plated flatware with which to eat it.
My thoughts turned immediately to the people I had seen being treated in animal stalls just days earlier.
A few months later, I saw an article in Architectural Digest with a headline reading, “Romancing the Stone: In the Hills of Eastern Pennsylvania Rises a Prototypical French Farmhouse.” Amid a sequence of elegant photos, it described a twenty-four-room mansion inspired by “ancient stones of la France profonde ” and featuring “an impossibly French” kitchen with a “white-walnut winery sorting table” and a separate “grandchildren’s cottage” of stone columns imported from Europe.
The magazine didn’t disclose the name of the retired executive for whom this mansion was built, but it was common knowledge in the executive suite at CIGNA who lived there. It was the company’s former chairman and CEO, Wilson Taylor, whose salary in 2000, his last year with the company, was twenty-four million dollars—which doesn’t include the additional millions he reaped from stock options and deferred compensation.
When I read that article and saw the stunning pictures of Taylor’s new place, it became clear to me, in ways that it hadn’t before, that people enrolled in CIGNA’s insurance plans had actually helped pay for that twenty-four-room stone manse with its seventeenth-century Spanish columns and its impossibly French kitchen.
Furthermore, I could now see clearly, those people in Wise County would not have had to stand in line in the rain for hours to get care in animal stalls if so much of the money Americans spend for health care didn’t wind up in the pockets of insurance company executives and their Wall Street masters.
C H A P T E R V
Health Care History, Reform,
and Failure
U NLIKE developed countries that took deliberate action at their highest levels to create the national health care systems they currently enjoy, America largely forfeited the development
Insurers take these actions because they want to get rid of risk—policyholders who are costing them more money in claims than they had anticipated. For-profit companies are most aggressive in doing this because of the constant pressure from Wall Street to meet their earnings expectations. After acknowledging in a 2008 conference call with financial analysts that her company had spent more on medical care during the previous three months than the analysts had expected, WellPoint’s CEO, Angela Braly, promised that in the future, “we will not sacrifice profitability for membership.” WellPoint and other insurers have shown, however, that they are perfectly willing to sacrifice their members for profits.
LET THEM EAT CAKE—AND SEND THEM
TO ANIMAL STALLS WHEN THEY GET SICK
When I went back to my job at CIGNA’s corporate headquarters after my trip to Wise County, my mind was in turmoil. I was trying to process what I had seen. I talked to some of my colleagues and even showed them pictures I had taken at the expedition. I was having a very hard time finishing the health care reform document I had been assigned.
The power of my experience in Wise County really hit home a couple of weeks later as I was boarding one of the two private jets CIGNA uses to fly executives around the country. I flew on those jets several times a year. With conference tables, video screens, leather seats, and deep carpet, they make first class on a commercial airliner look shabby. As usual, on this flight, which was taking me to a meeting in Connecticut, a uniformed attendant brought me lunch on a gold-rimmed plate and handed me gold-plated flatware with which to eat it.
My thoughts turned immediately to the people I had seen being treated in animal stalls just days earlier.
A few months later, I saw an article in Architectural Digest with a headline reading, “Romancing the Stone: In the Hills of Eastern Pennsylvania Rises a Prototypical French Farmhouse.” Amid a sequence of elegant photos, it described a twenty-four-room mansion inspired by “ancient stones of la France profonde ” and featuring “an impossibly French” kitchen with a “white-walnut winery sorting table” and a separate “grandchildren’s cottage” of stone columns imported from Europe.
The magazine didn’t disclose the name of the retired executive for whom this mansion was built, but it was common knowledge in the executive suite at CIGNA who lived there. It was the company’s former chairman and CEO, Wilson Taylor, whose salary in 2000, his last year with the company, was twenty-four million dollars—which doesn’t include the additional millions he reaped from stock options and deferred compensation.
When I read that article and saw the stunning pictures of Taylor’s new place, it became clear to me, in ways that it hadn’t before, that people enrolled in CIGNA’s insurance plans had actually helped pay for that twenty-four-room stone manse with its seventeenth-century Spanish columns and its impossibly French kitchen.
Furthermore, I could now see clearly, those people in Wise County would not have had to stand in line in the rain for hours to get care in animal stalls if so much of the money Americans spend for health care didn’t wind up in the pockets of insurance company executives and their Wall Street masters.
C H A P T E R V
Health Care History, Reform,
and Failure
U NLIKE developed countries that took deliberate action at their highest levels to create the national health care systems they currently enjoy, America largely forfeited the development
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