For NPR, April Dembosky reports on another infringement on the right to sue, but this time this is being applied in the health insurance market – Sutter Health‘s contract with companies removes the right to sue the company by the company or the employees:
San Francisco Bay Area companies say Sutter Health is strong-arming them into a contract that would help the hospital system secure its power over prices and potentially raise the cost of medical care for their employees in the future.
Dozens of companies have received a letter, via their insurance administrators, asking them to waive their rights to sue Sutter. If they don’t, a fact sheetincluded in the letter says, the companies’ employees who get care through Sutter’s network of hospitals, doctors and medical services will no longer have access to discounted in-network prices.
“In both choices, Castlight and our employees lose,” says Jennifer Chaloemtiarana, general counsel for Castlight Health, a tech company in San Francisco that received one of these letters this spring. She thought it was strange.
Castlight is self-insured, meaning it hires an insurance company — in this case, Anthem Blue Cross — to manage the administrative details of its health coverage. But when an employee gets sick, Castlight pays the bill, not Anthem. Anthem basically functions as a middleman, including negotiating discounted prices with providers like Sutter.
“We don’t have a direct relationship with Sutter Health,” Chaloemtiarana says. “So the letter was unusual in that regard, because it asked us to make certain legal agreements with Sutter.”
The letter is from Anthem Blue Cross, but it says if Castlight has any disputes with Sutter, Castlight has to agree to arbitrate with Sutter Health. Castlight can’t sue. And if it doesn’t agree, Castlight’s employees will lose their in-network medical rates.
Sutter is the dominant northern California provider, and they sound remarkably like the GOP when it comes to the studies that suggest they use their position unfairly:
“Recent academic studies have been one-sided and misrepresent the competitive environment of Northern California,” said Bill Gleeson, vice president of communications for Sutter, adding that the studies “unjustly inflate the so-called market share of Sutter. There’s competition all around.”
The moat around their industry is rather wide. Regardless, suggesting that a mere contract can remove a Constitutional right simply strikes me as madness, as we’ve discussed before. If the Democrats take control of Congress in today’s election, I wonder if they’ll address this issue. It steams me more than a little.
