Editor's Page

Who’s Wasting Money Now?

The price for these ads: $200,000. The irony is delicious: The HMO lobby has all this money to waste on blaming someone else for wasting money.

As it is, the ads have already run on CNN and other networks. It’s all in an attempt to thwart federal legislation that would allow patients to sue their HMOs and place other regulations on health insurers.

Of course, the insurance lobby is against this legislation. (Incidentally, more than nine out of 10 optometrists favor letting patients sue their HMOs, this month’s National Panel, Doctors of Optometry reports.) The tactic the HMOs have employed, however, is the lowest of blows.

What makes it so low? There’s the irony of spending all that money, for one. There’s also the fact that there’s enough blame to go around for inefficiency in our health-care system. For insurers to put out a message that doctors’ mistakes and malpractice judgments are the real culprits behind out big buck-little bang health system shirks their own share of the blame.

It’s one more piece of evidence of how money taints health-care policy discussions. Whether or not you speak the truth is immaterial. What’s important is that you have a pulpit. Buy it or commandeer it, but once you have it, you can spew forth any kind of gibberish.

Whether or not people will buy it, though, is another story. And this makes the AAHP’s ad campaign all the more wasteful. Whom do you think the people who watch those commercials are going to believe: The gargantuan, impersonal HMOs who give them the runaround and put them on eternal hold whenever they have a question or a problem with a claim? Or the caregivers who take the time personally to meet with them and help them try to wrestle some comfort and cure from this behemoth?

The HMOs have $200,000 to spend on nonsense, and they're blaming doctors for the problems with our health-care system. Cover your backs.

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© Review of Optometry OnLine
May 15, 2000