No candidate on the ballot this year can do as much for you as two propositions backed by Consumer Watchdog, Consumer Federation and other champions of the underdog.

YES ON PROP 45 will give us the power to stop price gouging by the health insurance companies.Congress requires us to buy health insurance, but they didn’t limit how much the insurance companies can charge us for it. That’s why we need Prop 45.

YES ON PROP 46 will make healthcare safer by preventing addicts from getting unnecessary prescription narcotics, requiring those who hold our lives in their hands to get tested for drugs, and allowing us to hold hospitals, doctors and insurance companies accountable when they injure us.

The insurance companies have spent over $100 million to defeat these pro-consumer propositions. They’ve bought off the politicians and paid for “studies” that predict disaster if these measures pass. And they’ve polluted the airwaves and the internet with outrageous lies about 45 and 46.

Let’s face it: our political system is corrupt. But, here in California, we voters can take matters into our own hands at the ballot box. We don’t have the money to compete with the industry, but – thanks to your support all these years – we have the truth on our side.

Tomorrow it will be 26 years since you joined me to pass Proposition 103 – the reform that stops insurance companies from overcharging us for auto, home and small business insurance. They said we could never defeat the insurance companies, but we did. They said it would never work…. But it did. California is the only state in the nation where auto insurance costs less today than it did in 1988! Prop 45 will extend that voter victory to health insurance.

Please join us again, tomorrow, by VOTING YES ON 45 AND 46.

Harvey Rosenfield

Founder – Consumer Watchdog

(A nice follow-up to my article about this subject recently from our friends at the Consumer Federation.   – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

by Richard Holober, Executive Director of the Consumer Federation of California

Health care industry-funded ads sounding the Prop 46 privacy alarm flunk the straight face test.

The ads allege Prop 46 sets up a secret medical record database that will be vulnerable to hacking. Not only is this absolutely false, it’s galling when you consider that the hospitals and insurance companies funding the ads have exposed millions of their own patient records through their negligence.

Prop 46 creates no new patient database. It does put to better use a database that has been in place for 17 years. The CURES database (Controlled Substance Utilization Review and Evaluation System) has never been breached. It is a database of prescriptions for Schedule II, III and IV narcotics. It is encrypted and stored on a server behind the Department of Justice’s firewall. Access is tightly restricted to licensed prescribers, pharmacists and law enforcement.

Overprescribing of prescription narcotics is a national epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control cited 475,000 emergency room visits and 36,000 deaths from prescription narcotic overdoses in a recent year, at a price tag of $72 billion in avoidable health care expenditures.

A big contributor to this epidemic is doctor shopping by drug abusers who go from one physician to the next, getting multiple prescriptions for the same narcotic. CURES is a powerful tool to halt doctor shopping.

But the CURES database is only effective if physicians check it before filling a prescription.

Prop 46 is named the Troy and Alana Pack Patient Safety Act in memory of two children who were killed on the sidewalk of their Danville neighborhood by a drugged driver who had been prescribed thousands of painkillers from multiple doctors at the same hospital. These doctors failed to check the CURES database to see whether their colleagues had already written the patient an identical prescription.

It’s estimated that only 8 percent of California doctors check the database before writing a prescription for a controlled substance. New York and Virginia recently required mandatory checks of their CURES-type databases, reducing doctor shopping in those states by 75 percent and 73 percent respectively.

Proposition 46 will require California doctors to follow suit and check the database before they first prescribe to a patient a Schedule II or III drug such as cocaine, methamphetamine, Demerol, OxyContin, anabolic steroids or codeine.

Requiring the check is a life-saving improvement to the law, and a far cry from the new “secret” and insecure database that No on 46 ads claim the measure would create.

The hospital and insurance companies behind the No on 46 ads have a lot of nerve to assume the mantle of privacy protectors. The perfect security record of CURES stands in stark contrast to the failure of these health care corporations to safeguard their own patient records.

According to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, from January 2013 through June 2014, hospitals and insurers including No on 46 funders exposed more than 1.5 million California patient records in data breaches.

A few recent careless breaches by Prop 46 opponents include:

AHMC Hospitals, Alhambra, 2013: 729,000 patient records breached

Anthem Blue Cross, 2012-2013: 57,000 patient records exposed

Blue Shield of California, 2013: 18,000 patient and physician records posted online

Health Net, 2011: 1,900,000 patient records lost

Kaiser Permanente, 2009-2014: 74,000 patient records compromised

Sutter Health, 2011: 947,000 patient records exposed

No on 46 funders have also worked overtime to weaken patient privacy laws. This year the California Hospital Association pushed amendments to Assembly Bill 1755 that would have ended mandatory patient notification requirements and instead allowed each hospital to decide whether or not to inform patients when its records were negligently released. In 2012, the California Hospital Association supported amendments to AB 439 that would have eliminated the right of most patients to have their day in court when a health care provider exposed their personal records to strangers. The Consumer Federation of California and our privacy allies stopped both health care industry efforts to mug patient privacy rights.

Hospitals and insurance companies should stop scaring voter about Prop 46, clean up their own negligent security practices, and respect California medical privacy laws.

– See more at: http://consumercal.org/prop-46…

LA Times Editorial Board Member pens op-ed against deceptive campaign tactics by insurance funded No on 46 campaign

by Brian Leubitz

The members of the LA Times Editorial Board don’t frequently go this far out on the limb against a ballot measure campaign. But check out this op-ed from a member of that board, Jon Healey, calling out the No on 46 campaign:

Even by the political world’s low standards of truthiness, a new commercial being aired by the No on Proposition 46 campaign is jaw-droppingly deceptive.

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Opponents are also trying to persuade voters that the measure would expose their personal health to more prying eyes. But that is, in a word, baloney. Proposition 46 increases the risk of medical data being hacked to the same degree that building a snowman increases the risk of low temperatures. Yet a new television commercial being run by the No on 46 campaign would have you believe that the measure would practically put your medical records up on EBay.

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The implication is that the proposition would either create or pump more personal information into a database that’s less protected than other online repositories. None of that is true. (LA Times / Jon Healey)

I support Prop 46 for a number of reasons. The cap on non-economic damages in MICRA has been devastating for patients across the state. It makes some patients “cheaper” by emphasizing concrete economic damages like lost income. Yes, an insurance company CEO would have brought home more definable money than a child, but does that really mean that only malpractice against the rich and established should give rise to a claim? It means that killing a patient is frequently cheaper than causing expensive long-term health consequences.

Yes, Prop 46 can be a bit confusing, but it has one clear underlining goal: improving patient safety. That is what the CURES requirement would do by decreasing prescription interactions, and that is what the drug testing requirement would do. Maybe you have quibbles about the means to the end goal, but the goal is clear: patient safety.

Could CURES, the prescription database, use some work? Of course, but to blithely state that the government should not maintain any of records? Newsflash: the government already has a ton of personal data. They have your income tax records and social security records. We trust the government with that data, yet somehow hackers are going to focus their efforts on a prescription drug database?

This is California, the home of innovation. We can build a database that makes patients safer and maintains their privacy. Are we really going to shy away from all computerization of our records, or should we only trust the insurance companies with our records?

All of these objections are a way of making the issues fuzzy by the NO campaign. But Prop 46 would bring at least some semblance of hope to the families that have had to deal with the loss of a loved one to medical malpractice that things can get better. That’s why California leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and Candace Lightner, the founder of MADD, are supporting Prop 46.

I recommend you see through the typical campaign insanity and vote YES on Prop 46.