Anthem Blue Cross could owe big refund checks to 730,000 Californians if its proposed rate hikes of up to 25% are deemed excessive thanks to an initiative voters will consider on the 2014 ballot.

The ballot measure requires health insurance companies to get approval before raising rates and allows that refunds be ordered on rates that are considered excessive after November 6, 2012.  When voters approve the measure, the insurance commissioner will have the power to retroactively order refunds for excessive rates.

Read the initiative here

“Anthem and every health insurance company in California are on notice: Excessive rate hikes they impose today could mean big refund checks for consumers down the road,” said Carmen Balber with Consumer Watchdog.

Anthem has proposed rate hikes averaging 18%, and as high as 25%, for 630,000 individual policyholders.

It has proposed rate hikes averaging 15%, and as high as 25%, for another 100,000 individual policyholders.

The Insurance Rate Public Justification and Accountability Act qualified for the ballot in August, after Consumer Watchdog Campaign and allies submitted petitions containing 800,000 voter signatures.

“Californians can no longer afford the outrageous double-digit rate hikes health insurance companies like Anthem have imposed year after year, and sometimes multiple times a year, ” said Jamie Court, proponent of the ballot measure and president of Consumer Watchdog. “This initiative gives voters the chance to take control of health insurance prices by forcing health insurance companies to publicly open their books and justify rates, under penalty of perjury.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the first person to sign the ballot petition, is an honorary co-chair of the ballot initiative campaign, which is also supported by California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones.

The ballot initiative builds on California’s successful model of rate regulation for auto, home and other property and business insurance. That law, Proposition 103, was enacted by the voters in 1988 and has saved California drivers $62 billion since it was enacted.

The Insurance Rate Public Justification and Accountability Act:

• Requires health insurance companies to publicly disclose and justify, under penalty of perjury, proposed rate changes before they take effect.
• Makes every document filed by an insurance company to justify a rate increase a public record.
• Requires public hearings on proposed rate increases.
• Gives Californians the right to challenge excessive and unfair premium rate increases.
• Prohibits health, auto and home insurers from considering Californians’ credit history or prior insurance coverage when setting premiums or deciding whether to offer coverage.
• Gives the elected insurance commissioner authority to reject unjustified rate increases.

We have just one week to beat the insurance billionaires trying to buy this election.

We plastered these posters around the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles to expose these deceptive billionaire propositions. Can you help us make sure more voters know?

Please post our new posters on Facebook today. Don’t use Facebook? Share the posters directly from our website here.

Our grassroots campaign against Prop 33 has just a few hundred thousand dollars to compete with the $16.4 million spent by insurance billionaire George Joseph, chairman of Mercury Insurance.

And last week, Charlie Munger Jr., the heir to the Berkshire Hathaway fortune including GEICO Insurance, sank another $13 million – for a total $35 million – into the campaign for Prop 32.

Prop 32 will take away workers’ voices in Sacramento but preserve the power of big corporations and wealthy individuals – like Munger and Joseph – to spend unlimited amounts in elections. Prop 33 will deregulate auto insurance and allow insurance companies to raise rates on good drivers just because they decide to stop driving for awhile.

We’ve got just 7 days left to expose these billionaires and stop them from buying the election.

Please share our posters on Facebook, or find the posters on our website and email your friends.

Your voice can beat the money spent by these insurance billionaires, but only if you help us spread the word. Tell your friends to vote No on Props 32 and 33 today!

A campaign bankrolled by financially motivated pesticide and junk food companies is expected to lie – a lot. It’s what they always do when confronted by inconvenient facts and consumers seeking to protect their rights – like the Right to Know what’s in the food we eat and feed our families.

Prop 37 opponents have run one of the most deceptive misinformation campaigns in recent history – a $35 million deluge of one demonstrable lie after another to try and defeat a common sense measure that most Californians support.    

Today, the No on 37 campaign’s already tattered credibility was dealt yet another big blow with news that its “top scientist” is nothing more than a corporate shill willing to misrepresent himself and the University for which he works.

Meet Henry Miller – a spokesperson the No on 37 campaign has been all too eager to promote as an arbiter of good science and someone we can trust with our families health. Miller has been featured in No on 37 television ads, written outrageously deceptive opinion editorials, and has presented himself as an “unbiased” scientific expert.

And now he’s been caught misrepresenting Stanford University– forcing the No on 37 Campaign to pull and reshoot a statewide television ad identifying Miller as “Dr. Henry Miller, MD, Stanford University,” without disclosing his affiliation with the Hoover Institute, a right-wing think tank at the University. In other words, he works ON the Stanford campus as a corporate propagandist, but ISN’T a Professor at Stanford University.

The ad was pulled after the Yes on 37 campaign attorney sent a letter to Stanford pointing out that the university’s affiliation was being used in a political advertising campaign, in violation of university policy.  

Stanford also demanded that the campaign remove the campus from the ad’s background.

But this isn’t the most disturbing aspect of Miller’s sordid career. Before we trust anything he has to say about something as fundamental as our health, we’d do well to consider his two decades of work dedicated to undermining it:

• Miller shilled for Big Tobacco, where he helped Phillip Morris discredit the links between tobacco products, and cancer and heart disease;

• Miller advocates for the reintroduction of the toxic pesticide DDT, which was banned in the United States and has been linked to pre-term birth and fertility impairment in women;

• Miller aided Exxon’s  efforts to undercut the reality of climate change;

• Miller attacked the US Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to ensure proper vetting and testing of new drugs safety while urging it outsource more of its functions to private industries,

• And Miller claimed Japanese exposed to radiation from Fukushima “could actually have benefited” from it.

Miller isn’t the only dubious character the No On 37 stable, but his  one man “tour of lies” about Prop 37 includes some especially notable whoppers. He often repeats one claim that includes three lies in a single sentence, stating “The World Health Organization, American Medical Association, National Academy of Sciences and other respected medical and health organizations all conclude that genetically engineered foods are safe.”

The only problem is not one of these organizations has come to such a conclusion:

• A National Academy of Sciences report concluded that products of genetic engineering technology “carry the potential for introducing unintended compositional changes that may have adverse effects on human health.”

• The American Medical Association has adopted a position calling for mandatory safety assessments of genetically engineered foods.

• And the World Health Organization / United Nations food standards group, Codex Alimentarius, which sets the global science-based standards on food policy issues, states that mandatory safety studies should be required – a standard the US fails to meet.

In fact, within the past few weeks alone, independent peer reviewed studies have raised even more troubling questions about the impact of GMOs on our environment, and potential risks to our health.

Ultimately, to understand the No On 37 campaign’s credibility problems, just follow the money: the six largest pesticide corporations in the world have contributed nearly $20 million of its $35 million war chest. The two largest donors – Monsanto ($7.2 million) and Dupont ($4.9 million) – told us Agent Orange and DDT were safe. Now they’ve telling us we don’t deserve to know what’s in our food. And the kicker is that while Monsanto spends $ millions to deny our right to know in California, it supported labeling in Europe.

So who should we trust?

On the Yes side stands millions of California consumers and more than 2,000 leading consumer, health, women’s, faith-based, labor and other groups; 50 countries that already require GMO labeling; and a growing stack of peer-reviewed research linking genetically engineered foods to health and environmental problems.  

On the No side stands the largest pesticide, agribusiness and junk food companies in the world dedicated to saying and spending whatever it takes to hide the fact that most of the foods on store shelves right now are being genetically altered in a way  that could pose risks to our health and environment-but we don’t know which ones without labeling.

The central question of the Prop. 37 debate is this—Do consumers have the right to know what’s in the food we eat or is that decision better made by the likes of Henry Miller, Monsanto, and Dupont?

Stand up for your Right to Know-Yes on 37!

If you can spare a few bucks, click here.  Or visit us at www.carighttoknow.org, or on Facebook for other ways to help.

On November 6th, California voters will have a historic opportunity to reclaim our right to know what’s in the food we eat from powerful special interests known for endangering our health, our environment and deceiving the public.

Proposition 37 – The California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act – would simply require clear labeling of genetically modified foods (GMOs). These are foods that have been artificially altered by genes from other plants, animals, viruses, or bacteria – and are not found anywhere in nature.

Fifty countries around the world – representing more than 40% of the planet’s population – already require GMO labeling, including all of Europe, Japan, India and China.

Yet in the United States, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires no safety testing of GMO’s, no long-term health studies have been conducted (UPDATE: First Ever Long Term, Peer Reviewed Study Finds Massive Tumors in Rats Fed Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered Corn), and no labeling is required to alert unsuspecting consumers to the presence of these ingredients.  

The GMO Threat to Our Health and Environment

A growing body of peer-reviewed studies has linked GMO’s to allergies, organ toxicity, and other health problems. These studies must be followed up. The United Nations/World Health Organization food standards group and the American Medical Association have each called for mandatory safety testing of genetically engineered foods—foods many of us are eating, even though we don’t know it, every day.

Most recently, we’ve learned that Walmart will be selling a new sweet corn from Monsanto Company that has been genetically engineered with a Bt toxin INSIDE it. This toxin is known for disintegrating the stomach walls of insects, and causing kidney and liver damage in rats.

What’s it going to do to our bodies? We don’t know.  And because GMO foods aren’t labeled, Walmart’s customers don’t get to choose whether they want to be a part of the experiment.

Various environmental problems have also been linked to genetic engineering–including biodiversity loss, an overall increase in pesticide use, the emergence of super weeds that are threatening millions of acres of farmland, and the unintentional contamination of non-GMO and organic crops. And contrary to industry claims, GMO’s don’t increase farmer’s yields.

Ultimately, the free market is supposed to provide consumers with accurate information about products so we can make informed choices. Yet in the case of genetically altered food, and the risks it may pose to our health and environment, we are all being left in the dark.

Proposition 37 and Our Right to Know

Americans have made it abundantly clear that we support the fundamental, democratic right to know what’s in the food we eat and feed our children – particularly when it’s been genetically engineered in a laboratory, and especially given the growing health and environmental concerns linked to these products.

That’s why in just 10 weeks, nearly a million signatures were gathered by a volunteer army of concerned California citizens this spring, easily qualifying Prop 37 for the November ballot. Also this spring, the FDA received more than a million comments demanding that genetically engineered foods be labeled (more than any petition in the agency’s history) andpolling showed that approximately 90% of Americans (and Californians) agreed.

GMO labeling is not a new issue. To date, 19 US states have attempted to enact mandatory labeling laws through legislation—only to be blocked by the same entrenched special interests currently fighting Prop 37. That’s why we’re taking the question directly to consumers in the largest state in the union-and doing so knowing that victory here will be a victory for common sense food transparency everywhere.

For decades, we didn’t label foods with calorie or nutritional value information, but we do now, and many consumers use this information every day. Did prices go up when calories were added to a label? Of course they didn’t – and independent research shows they won’t if one more line of ink is added now either. Research also shows that Prop 37 has been carefully crafted in a way that provides far greater legal certainty for businesses than other consumer disclosure laws.

The No on 37 Campaign’s Growing Credibility Problem

There is no clearer David versus Goliath fight-anywhere in America–on this year’s ballot. On one side, is a truly grassroots people’s movement with overwhelming bipartisan support for the right to know what’s in the food we eat. On the other side, stands a who’s who of the world’s largest pesticide, agribusiness and junk food companies – a  $32 million war chest (almost all of which has come from special interests outside California) and a well-documented history of false product safety claims, discredited arguments, and outright doublespeak.  

Consider the “No” campaign’s two largest donors – Monsanto ($7.1 million) and DuPont ($4.9 million) – the same companies that told us Agent Orange and DDT were safe. And while spending wildly to fight our right to know what’s in our food in America, Monsanto also produced a series of adssupporting labeling of GMOs in Europe. In other words, Monsanto thinks Europeans have the right to know, but Americans don’t.    



Who Do You Trust: Big Pesticide or a Broad Based Public Interest Coalition?

The question before voters could not be starker: Whose side are you on? —  the discredited special interests like Monsanto and Dupont, or everyday California families; the more than a million individuals who stood up to get Prop 37 on the ballot; the tens of thousands  more who have joined us on Facebook; and the more than 2,000 consumer, environmental, farming, faith-based, political and labor organizations that have endorsed Yes on 37.

Opponents of Prop 37 have built a business model that relies on secrecy, inhibits consumer choice, and prevents small farmers, the organics industry, and truly natural food producers from competing on an equal playing field.

The time is now for all of us to reclaim our basic democratic right to know what’s really for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Prop 37 does one and only one thing-it gives California consumers the power to decide for ourselves what is best for our families.

Learn More or join us at www.carighttoknow.org

Help fuel our grassroots campaign by Contributing here, or by following us on Facebook and Twitter.

Consumer Advocates Call On Group To Withdraw Support For Measure That Would Raise Car Insurance Rates on Good Drivers

The nonprofit Greenlining Institute acknowledged in a San Francisco Bay Guardian story published today that it received a $25,000 donation from Mercury insurance company, and expects more for its work in support of Mercury-backed Proposition 33. Prop 33 is funded by Mercury insurance’s billionaire chairman George Joseph and would raise car insurance rates on good drivers who have a break in insurance coverage, even if they’re not driving.

In a letter, Consumer Watchdog urged Greenlining to reverse its decision to support Proposition 33. Greenlining opposed a nearly identical ballot measure proposed by Mercury insurance company in 2010, Prop 17.

Download the letter here

Read the San Francisco Bay Guardian story

“We are writing to urge you to reconsider your shocking support for Proposition 33 and the auto insurance redlining it seeks to legalize,” wrote Consumer Watchdog founder Harvey Rosenfield and Washington DC director Carmen Balber. “Greenlining purports to represent the very low-income drivers who will be hurt the most if Proposition 33 is approved next November, allowing insurance companies to surcharge Californians who stop driving for legitimate reasons and then choose to get back on the road.”

Prop 33 would overturn a 24-year-old law banning discriminatory practices by auto insurance companies that were brought to light in the 1987 California civil rights case, King v. Meese.

“The rampant practice of surcharging, or refusing to sell insurance to, people who were not previously insured was one of the most pernicious of the discriminatory techniques employed by the insurance industry,” said the letter. “In signing the ballot argument for Proposition 33, you have aligned yourself with George Joseph and Mercury Insurance, the most persistent partisans for the legalization of the old redlining tricks that made auto insurance inaccessible to low-income families and communities of color for decades.”

The letter notes that Proposition 33 targets Californians who stop driving for legitimate reasons:

• When low-wage workers who commute by bus need to get a car in order to maintain their job, they will be surcharged by about 40% for auto insurance;
• When immigrant drivers are finally able to obtain a California driver’s license and try to buy insurance, they will be forced to pay hundreds and possibly thousand of dollars more than the drivers who purchased insurance in the past, even though they are equally good drivers;
• When drivers who have found it financially impossible to maintain uninterrupted insurance coverage turn to the auto insurance market in hopes of complying with the mandatory insurance law, they will face a financial penalty for being poor;
• Those who cannot afford these massive surcharges will be exposed to penalties and seizure of their vehicles for failure to comply with the Financial Responsibility Law.

Consumer Watchdog has been growling for a while about global corporations that use a tax loophole to pay less in California corporate taxes than in-state companies. Four major companies–Kimberly Clark (Kleenex, Scott toilet paper), General Motors, Chrysler and International Paper–have even launched a major lobbying campaign in the state to save their selfish loophole. They are happy, obviously, cheating the state of a billion or more dollars a year that could keep teachers in jobs, the disabled out of nursing homes and parks open.

Now there’s a ballot initiative, Prop 39, that’s aimed at closing the tax loophole, and one of its first public blasts is this funny video, “The Tax Dodger Olympic Dash”–track and field for billionaires.

Along with the video is a text tidbit, revealing that the same companies fighting to keep their loophole in California fought just as hard to keep such tax loopholes out of their home states. There’s nothing like a heaping helping of corporate hypocrisy to start the day!

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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Thursday’s reports that some Californians will get rebates on their health insurance premiums are a little bit of good news–but not nearly as good as it could be.

An L.A. Times story reports that California small businesses and their employees who are insured by United Health Group will get rebates averaging $98 on last year’s premiums because United Health didn’t spend at least 80% of the premiums on health care, a requirement under the federal health reform. The total will come to about $3.5 million in the state. Other insurers may also owe money on small business, large employer and individual policies–the figures are still being crunched.

But what if insurance companies could not overcharge us in the first place? The 80% rule in the federal law only encourages insurance companies to pay hospitals and doctors inflated prices, because it inflates the 20% that insurance companies get to keep. (It’s like the Hollywood agent who gets a 15% cut–his personal incentive is to get the biggest price for his client.) With no real curbs in California on how much insurance companies can charge, they have no incentive to bargain for lower medical costs to begin with.

Unlike 35 other states, California has no power to make health insurance companies justify their rates and to deny or modify unreasonable or unjustified rates before they go into effect. Californians also have no right to make the state do its job through consumer challenges to unjustified rates. All this would change if voters pass an initiative, sponsored by the Consumer Watchdog Campaign, that’s headed for the November ballot.

Which brings us to another huge source of savings–the inflated rates that insurance companies encourage hospitals and in some cases doctors to charge. A shocking recent story, also in the L.A. Times, found that patients who are insured are often paying out of pocket many times the amount of patients who pay cash for the same treatment.

Here, from the story, is how it works:

Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for medical bills

The lowest price is usually available only if patients don’t use their health insurance. In one case, blood tests that cost an insured patient $415 would have been $95 in cash.

May 27, 2012|By Chad Terhune

A Long Beach hospital charged Jo Ann Snyder $6,707 for a CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis after colon surgery. But because she had health insurance with Blue Shield of California, her share was much less: $2,336.

Then Snyder tripped across one of the little-known secrets of healthcare: If she hadn’t used her insurance, her bill would have been even lower, just $1,054.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Snyder, a 57-year-old hair salon manager. “I was really upset that I got charged so much and Blue Shield allowed that. You expect them to work harder for you and negotiate a better deal.”Unknown to most consumers, many hospitals and physicians offer steep discounts for cash-paying patients regardless of income. But there’s a catch: Typically you can get the lowest price only if you don’t use your health insurance.

That disparity in pricing is coming under fire from people like Snyder, who say it’s unfair for patients who pay hefty insurance premiums and deductibles to be penalized with higher rates for treatment.

The difference in price can be stunning. Los Alamitos Medical Center, for instance, lists a CT scan of the abdomen on a state website for $4,423. Blue Shield says its negotiated rate at the hospital is about $2,400.

When The Times called for a cash price, the hospital said it was $250.

Is your blood boiling yet? Insured patients can try to pay the cash price, but elsewhere in the story we find that hospitals may not even allow patients with insurance to get the cash price. And if you pay cash, it doesn’t count against your deductible or the out-of-pocket limit for your policy. Is this cozy or what for the (usually for-profit) insurance companies and (often for-profit) hospitals?

If California had the power to approve, deny or modify unjustified health insurance rates before they went into effect, the insurance companies would have to do more than prove they’re spending 80% of your premium on whatever they can define as “health care.” With their books open and both consumers and regulators looking on, they’d have powerful incentives to push harder to bring down costs, just as auto insurance companies do—in large part because regulators are watching. Executive compensation in the millions would no longer come out of patients’ pockets.

That form of regulation, called “prior approval” of rates, is the aim of the ballot initiative sponsored by the Consumer Watchdog Campaign. The same kind of regulation, passed by voters as Proposition 103 in 1988, already saves hundreds of millions of dollars a year on average for auto and homeowner insurance buyers in the state. In just the first nine years after voters passed Prop 103 in 1988, property and casualty insurance companies had to fork over more than $1 billion in consumer rebates–similar in type to the $3.5 million United Health is paying.

It’s no surprise that the health industry is one of the state’s most powerful political lobbies. It’s no surprise that such lobbying power has killed every effort to pass effective control of health insurance rates in the Legislature. It’s also no surprise that stories like the one above are making voters furious. At least voters, unlike too many politicians, don’t have to do what the health insurance industry tells them to do.

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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.