Measure 42: Insurance based on unreliable credit data can't be fair.
Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Laura Cooper For The Register-Guard It is the election season, and the airwaves are glutted with political advertisements. Like most people, I zone out most of those ads. One ad, however, got my attention, because its claims are so astonishingly and...

Insurance buffer fund needs boost.
Byline: LEE C. CHIPONGIAN The Insurance Commission's so-called buffer fund is only P1.535 billion as of latest tally, and the agency needs to beef up their rescue fund to at least P5 billion. Based on Department of Finance documents IC being an attached agency of...

Gov't stable despite rallies - Palace; GMA names new head of Insurance Commission.
Byline: FERDIE J. MAGLALANG Undeclared martial law not true - Ermita Malacanang yesterday assured that the Arroyo administration remains stable despite relentless protest rallies by the opposition and other civil society groups demanding for President Arroyo's resignation. Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita made the...

Dealing with insurers, one by one.
We doctors have been complaining for years about the stress, frustration, and cost of all the lawsuits brought against us by patients ("Class Action Likely to Help Doctors Recoup Losses," April 15, 2005, p. 9). And here we are, bringing a class action lawsuit against the insurance...

Insurance denials might deter alcohol screening.
Nearly 25% of trauma surgeons report that they have been denied payment by an insurer in the last 6 months because a patient was under the influence of alcohol or drugs when his or her traumatic injury occurred, according to Larry M. Gentilello, M.D., of the University of Texas...

Legal expert highlights potential risks of concierge care.
DALLAS -- Among the so-called concierge-care models, practices that offer fees for non-covered services to patients who have insurance carry the highest legal risk, attorney John Marquis said at a national conference on concierge medicine. In light of recent actions taken by Congress, state insurance commissioners, and...

More regulation be damned.
A statement made during the earliest stages of prosecutor Eliot Spitzer's dance truly confounded me. It was this, from The Daily Telegraph in London: "Analysts note that the scandal is likely to lead to increased regulation." Whatever is unfolding in the name of the New York Attorney General, the...

Pro & con: is the insurance cycle responsible for rising malpractice premiums?
YES Medical malpractice claims have held steady yet insurance premiums have skyrocketed. This pattern can be attributed to the cyclical nature of the commercial insurance business. We are in the midst of a classic "hard" insurance cycle. The first such crisis, which was particularly acute...

Licensing reform: not the spirit of the law. (Broker Focus).
The gramm-leach-bliley act has been successful in motivating states--under threat of federal oversight--to make their broker licensing laws reciprocal. Now they just have to make those laws uniform. At the surface, it would appear that states have been successful in adhering to the producer licensing reform agenda...

Anthem-WellPoint merger.
Anthem Inc., the for-profit BlueCross BlueShield insurance giant that covers nearly 13 million people, will need to start paying special attention to the needs of mental health patients. As part of its $16.4 billion merger deal with WellPoint Health Networks, a Blues plan serving California and several other states,...