insurance letter termination

FTCR News Story

• The politics of the health care vote
  Jerry Flanagan of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights called the $25 million "slush-fund money to do the work the union should be doing themselves." Flanagan said these amendments were "stuck in at the last moment and hidden in the fine print of the bill."
• Núñez sweetens deal for unions
  "We were waiting for the payoff to show up," said Jerry Flanagan, healthcare policy director for the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a Santa Monica-based nonprofit that believes the Núñez plan will be too expensive for some consumers. "It's really remarkable, in terms of the express aiming of this money toward two particular unions."
• Delay in healthcare vote urged;
  Labor and legislators haven't had time to vet the Nunez-backed plan, a union group says.; Jerry Flanagan, the healthcare advocate with the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a Santa Monica-based nonprofit organization, said SEIU's organizing drive also stood to gain from the bill. He said one provision would allow retail clinics such as ones that Wal-Mart wants to establish to be staffed with medical assistants without a physician present.
• Poizner: Blue Shield canceled policies;
  State insurance chief plans to pursue a $12.6 million fine for dropping patients.; Consumer advocates accused Blue Shield of downplaying the issue and called for tougher regulations on health insurers. "All big insurers are making money for themselves by denying people coverage," said Jerry Flanagan of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. "Blue Shield refuses to acknowledge that they have done anything wrong."
• Stanford, Berkeley, UCSF, Buck get nod for stem cell facility grants
  The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, based in Santa Monica, said release of the news makes a mockery of CIRM's claims of openness and transparency. "We don't know what the universities asked for," said John Simpson, the foundation's stem cell project director. "We only know what the scientific reviewers in their closed, clubby, secret meeting decided to recommend." Simpson also said the applicants should have been identified from the beginning of the process.
• Watchdog wants spending on travel, meals, gifts justified
  The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a consumer and political reform group based in Santa Monica, praised the commission for considering tougher disclosure rules but said the requirements should go beyond what the commission was proposing to include details about activities on a trip and a list of participants.
• Health Insurance Issue Sparks Fight Among Democrats, Bogs Down Schwarzenegger
  The issue of requiring individuals to purchase health insurance is triggering an escalating fight between the top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination even as the same question is bogging down Governor Schwarzenegger's plan to make sure all Californians are insured. "It's all connected and the connection here is a push for an individual mandate," a critic of Mr. Schwarzenegger's proposal, Carmen Balber of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, said. "If you're not limiting what private insurers can charge, then that is, in the end, an unlimited burden on individuals," Ms. Balber said.
• Institutions Revealed in California Grant-Conflict Flap
  Critics of CIRM, including John M. Simpson, stem cell project director for the Foundation of Taxpayer and Consumer Rights of Santa Monica, California, have called for the resignation of both Klein and Reed. Reed has temporarily recused himself from CIRM activities during the state investigation. Simpson said in a news release that Klein has never understood that CIRM is a state agency. "CIRM is not a private club or foundation and cannot be run as if it were," he said.
• Stem cell housecleaning;
  Grants are great, but the California institute created to fund research needs to put its business in order.; The agency's conflict-of-interest rules clearly forbid board members from trying to influence its business with their own organizations. Worse, Reed was advised to write the letter by Robert Klein, the chairman of the governing board and the go-getter who made Proposition 71 happen. He has been under enough heat from consumer groups to know that conflicts are an inherent danger for the agency, whose 29-member governing board is made up of people who have a direct interest in gaining stem cell funding.
• Stem cell board member to recuse himself;
  The Fair Political Practices Commission is responsible for enforcing laws governing the stem cell agency, which was created by voter approval of Proposition 71 in 2004. It opened the investigation Monday in response to a complaint file by John Simpson of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a Santa Monica consumer advocacy group.
• The wrong way to reform term limits; There's a reason special interests are bankrolling Proposition 93.
  California's elected officials have failed this year to take care of any pressing state problems -- except their own. No healthcare reform. No prison reform. No solution to the multibillion-dollar budget deficit. Instead, this year's principal public policy result is a ballot measure to extend legislators' current terms in office. The biggest beneficiaries are the most powerful: Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senate leader Don Perata, who otherwise would be forced out of office next year by term limits.
• Burnham official recuses himself from stem cell work in probe
  John Simpson of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights filed a complaint about the incident to the FPPC and asked for Reed's resignation. A week later, Chiang said he thought the commission should look into the matter.
• Stem cell panelist steps aside
  John Simpson, stem cell project director for the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, targeted Reed in a Nov. 21 complaint on the basis of documents first obtained by David Jensen, a blogger who follows the stem cell agency closely. On Aug. 2, Reed sent a seven-page letter to the agency's scientific staff urging them to revisit a decision to toss out a research grant application from a scientist affiliated with Reed's institute.
• Conflicts trip up state stem cell program;
  Burnham's Reed to be investigated by state commission; In a related matter, the California Fair Political Practices Commission announced Tuesday it would investigate member John Reed for allegedly improperly lobbying on a grant for the Burnham Institute in La Jolla. Reed is president and chief executive of the Burnham Institute. The commission said its investigation of Reed was prompted by a complaint from the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights -- a watchdog group.
• Probe of stem cell agency
  A taxpayers group filed a complaint Nov. 21 alleging that John Reed, one of the 29 members of the stem cell agency's board, broke state conflict-of-interest law by asking agency staff to reconsider their decision to reject a $638,000 grant to a researcher at the institute he heads.
• Burnham chief faces conflict probe
  The commission has sent letters to the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica and state Controller John Chiang to inform them that their requests for the investigation have been accepted, commission spokesman Roman Porter said.
• Stem cell institute criticized on ethics
  Taxpayer advocates who hammered the stem cell institute on the Reed matter were stymied as to how leaders of academic institutions did not identify the letters of recommendation as a potential conflict of interest. "It's simple. Stem cell board members cannot take part in any way in grants to their institutions," said John Simpson of the nonprofit Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica. "Perhaps a few of these deans need to enroll in Ethics 101 at their universities and get the basics down."
• State stem cell agency rejects 10 applications for grant money
  John Simpson, of the Santa Monica-based watchdog group Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, said the academic deans on the board should have known better. "Some of these academics just don't get it," he said.
• Stem cell agency rejects 10 grant