What she failed to add was that her client, Unitedhealth had over a dozen cases pending against it at the time. As of this writing, she and Unitedhealth have lost every case ever filed against it under the same patient rights law she said needed to be repealed.
What is happening here in Hawaii is only the tip of the iceburg.
By the end of this year, publicly traded companies will own about 30% of Medicaid, up from 19.6% two years earlier.
The privatization of Medicaid and Medicare has gone from $105.3 billion in 2009, to $113.7 billion in 2010, and already stands at $65 billion for the first half of 2011. Not a penny of that $284 billion needs to be repaid.
The political hot potato neither Republicans nor Democrats are talking about is who determines how much of that money actually needs to be spent. Or even if any of this nice federal and state funding has actually been spent on real medical care for people who need it.
The amicus brief and state laws like SB 1274 clear the way for these publicly traded companies to increase profits without worrying about federal regulatory interference. Unitedhealth and Wellcare are only two of about ten publicly traded health companies together splitting about $11 billion every month in federal and state revenues for Medicaid and Medicare.
The morning after last November's elections, Public Citizen published a study of the link between "party-shifting contests" and "unregulated third-party spending." Twenty-two of fifty-eight new Republicans were in seven of the eight states that just settled with Wellcare for criminal Medicaid fraud claims. Unregulated third party spending in those seven states came to $11 million, of the $54 million tracked.
Eighty-five percent of the total was spent in states where six publicly traded corporations (Unitedhealth, Wellcare, Wellpoint, Centene, Amerigroup and Molina) own Medicaid contracts. Unitedhealth alone operated either Medicaid or Medicare HMOs in 28 of the 33 states where Republicans beat Democrats, and was bidding on new contracts with a 29th state at the time.
On August 5, the White House took another swipe at federal protections for people on Medicaid, and particularly those with disabilities. CMS sent a letter out telling states how to auction off their Medicaid contracts without worrying about inconvenient federal safeguards. The legal work-arounds that CMS proposes specifically target what is called "maintenance of effort." New Medicaid contracts/programs cannot restrict existing access to program benefits.
Now they can.
The politics of Medicaid/Medicare corruption override party membership. Greed trumps ideology, apparently.
You see it as far back as 2002. That's the year a group of Wall Street financiers bought Florida's biggest Medicaid HMO, a little known company named Wellcare. George Soros, head of the group, was known for donating to Democrats. The financiers' hand-picked CEO was a Bush fundraiser.
Between taking the company public in 2004 and selling out before the very public FBI raid in October 2007 (the last shares were sold only weeks earlier), the original investors turned $70 million into almost $900 million.
The whistleblower complaint that led to a dawn raid by 200 FBI agents was not unsealed until last summer, almost three years later. Reading it, however, makes it very clear that the criminally fraudulent practices that generated such excessive profits traced back to the change of ownership in 2002.
Wellcare almost appears to have been structured from the get-go as a financial experiment in how to get rich from Medicaid and Medicare.
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