UnitedHealth hotline ‘urges employees to attend tea parties’
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 4:22 pm
- 7 Comments
One of the country’s largest health insurers, Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group, is enlisting its employees in its campaign about health care reform. According to Talking Points Memo, the company’s advocacy hotline is helping employees write notes to members of Congress and, in at least one case, a hotline operator encouraged a caller to attend tea parties.
Last week, UnitedHealth sent a letter to employees urging them to call the company’s United for Health Reform Advocacy Hotline, where specialists could help workers “personalize your message” about health care reform and connect them to congressional offices. TPM reports that an individual insured by UnitedHealth Group called the line and was encouraged to attend a tea party and directed to a listing of events hosted by the rightwing America’s Independent Party.
Update: In an email, UnitedHealth’s John Parker insisted that the company doesn’t share third-party event listings, but only information about town halls sponsored by members of Congress. “We have never encouraged our employees to participate in ‘tea parties,’” he added. “We only provide information, that is publicly available.”
The company is involved in the health care debate in another way. A company it owns, the Lewin Group, is often cited for research on health insurance costs and coverage, but rarely is UnitedHealth’s ownership (via their subsidiary Ingenix) mentioned in the media. In the past 24 hours, seven news stories or op-eds at Google News cited the Lewin Group’s statistics on health care reform; of those, only three — including our sister site, the Colorado Independent — mentioned that the consulting group is owned by UnitedHealth.
The group is said to operate independently from the parent company. Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Lewin Group was “accused by the New York attorney general and the American Medical Association of helping insurers shift medical expenses to consumers by distributing skewed data. Ingenix supplied UnitedHealth and other insurers with data that allegedly understated the ‘reasonable and customary’ doctor fees that insurers use to determine how much they will reimburse consumers for out-of-network care.”
UnitedHealth ended up settling, paying $50 million to the New York attorney general and $350 million to the AMA.
7 Comments
Pingback posted August 19, 2009 @ 8:20 pm
[...] Minnesota Independent: News. Politics. Media. » UnitedHealth hotline urges employees to attend tea … UnitedHealth hotline urges employees to attend tea parties By PAUL SCHMELZER 8/19/09 4:22 PM One of the country’s largest health insurers, Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth Group, is enlisting its employees in its campaign about health care reform. According to Talking Points Memo, the company’s advocacy hotline is helping employees write notes to members of Congress and, in at least one case, a hotline operator encouraged a caller to attend tea parties. [...]
Comment posted August 20, 2009 @ 1:49 am
“Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Lewin Group was “accused by the New York attorney general and the American Medical Association of helping insurers shift medical expenses to consumers by distributing skewed data.”
That is completely false. The Post reported no such thing.
Comment posted August 20, 2009 @ 4:07 am
“Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Lewin Group was “accused by the New York attorney general…”
The Washington Post reported no such thing. If you can’t get your facts straight, don’t bother writing this crap.
Comment posted August 20, 2009 @ 9:36 am
Another example of the right wing organizing people to attend these meetings and pretend to be a grass roots movement. How phoney!
The only true grass roots movements are on the left side of the fence. We don’t stoop so low as to send out mass e-mails and tell employees or organization members to attend and protest.
Comment posted August 20, 2009 @ 11:25 pm
What else can you expect from the company that allowed Bill McGuire to line his pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars during his brief tenure at United?
Comment posted August 21, 2009 @ 9:23 am
I am laughing so hard I hope you’ll forgive any typos. Jeff and Lisa above scream out that the Washington Post never reported on the Lewin groups nefarious activities. A red herring……….. the facts are that Lewin paid $50 million to settle with the NY attorney general and $300 million to settle with the American Medical Association for doing exactly what this article reports.
Here is the link to the American Medical News that reports the entire story:
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/01/26/bil10126.htm
Whether the Post reported is irrelevant. A misattributed source does not erase the facts.
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