WellPoint – Healthcare-NOW

Obamacare architect leaves White House for pharmaceutical industry job

Few people embody the corporatist revolving door greasing Washington as purely as Elizabeth Fowler By Glenn Greenwald for the Guardian – When the legislation that became known as “Obamacare” was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation.…

The Insurers’ Real Agenda for Change

By Wendell Potter for the Huffington Post – The media had lots of health care news to obsess about last week. A federal judge ruled the health care reform law unconstitutional, and Senate Republicans tried in vain to repeal the law. But most of the press paid virtually no attention to a potentially much more…

In Breakaway, Big Health Insurers Seek To Boost Washington Clout

By Bara Vaida for NPR – Five of the nation’s largest health insurance companies are looking to build their own inside-the-Beltway coalition to influence implementation of the new health law and congressional efforts to change it. The companies – Aetna, Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealthcare and WellPoint — are shopping around Washington for a public relations firm…

Single-Payer is Inevitable

Progressives and Conservatives Agree By Rob Stone, MD – “The new health care legislation is a step toward elimination, by slow strangulation, of private health insurance and establishment of government as the ‘single payer.’” – George Will, in his weekly newspaper column, Sunday July 11, 2010 Everyone loves to pick on the Affordable Care Act…

For-Profit Insurers Leaning on Regulators to “Reform” Health Reform

By Wendell Potter for Huffington Post – The nation’s biggest insurers — not happy with provisions of the four-month-old health care reform law that would force many of them to spend more of the money they collect in premiums for their policyholders’ medical care — are pressuring regulators to disregard what members of Congress intended…

Former President Bush’s brother collapses at Wellpoint meeting

From wishtv.com – INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – The WellPoint shareholders meeting in downtown Indianapolis ended much earlier than some disgruntled shareholders would have liked when 71-year-old William H.T. Bush, brother of the first President Bush, collapsed. For the fourth year in a row, in the shadow of WellPoint corporate headquarters in downtown Indianapolis, on the day…

Action Alert: End WellPoint’s Greed

On May 18th, Dr. Rob Stone plans to deliver a resolution to WellPoint/Anthem, the largest health insurance company in the US, calling for it to return to its charitable, non-profit roots at their upcoming shareholder meeting in Indianapolis. WellPoint, like all health insurance companies in the nation, is a parasitic middleman that enriches its executives…

Nurses Blast 39% Anthem Blue Cross Rate Hike “Stronger Medicine Needed to End Insurance Abuses”

The nation’s largest union and professional organization of registered nurses, National Nurses United, today joined the national condemnation of Anthem Blue Cross for imposing rate hikes of up to 39 percent for Californians with individual policies, but said the outrage must “go beyond words to action to end insurance abuses once and for all.” “Anthem’s…

Mobilization for Health Care for All Goes National on Thursday

In just two more days, the Mobilization for Health Care for All goes national. When we launched this campaign we envisioned about 100 people signing up to sit in in the first weeks of the campaign – but with over 700 already, we’re now well on our way to 1000 pledges. And we originally talked…

Well, Well… Going to Healthcare Hell

By Donna Smith – We’ve learned some remarkable things over the past few weeks about healthcare reform in these United States. Remarkable, tragic, sad, disgusting and unacceptable truths about what we’ve put up with for decades and what we are about to see written into law unless we rise up. It was Jesus Christ who…