Largest Insurers Caught Astro-Turfing on Company Time!

David sent this along from the San Francisco Business Times, which demonstrates the worthy activities that the largest private, for-profit insurance companies pay for with your insurance premiums!

And would there have been any other way for this story to have reached Consumer Watchdog than through UHC and Wellpoint employees? 

Think of it, two major for-profit insurance companies - fragged by their own staff - and in a recession economy, no less! It restores my faith in my fellow American workers who, in a perilous economy, apparently still look out for "the little guy." 

Either that, or those employees just can't stand their executives. 

Excerpts from the San Francisco Business Times article on Thursday:

"A Santa Monica group has urged California Attorney General Jerry Brown to probe whether the nation’s two largest health insurers have asked their workers to lobby Congress — during business hours — to weaken health reform.

Consumer Watchdog on Wednesday said in a letter to Brown that Minneapolis-based UnitedHealthcare (NYSE: UNH) and Wellpoint Inc. (NYSE: WLP) of Indianapolis have launched national campaigns to individually “assist” employees in writing and calling members of Congress. The coercion, the Santa Monica group states, is illegal under the California Labor Code.

Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog provided a copy of the letter that UnitedHealthcare sent to 75,000 employees. Media reports state the note was addressed from the company’s executive vice president and chief of medical affairs, Reed Tuckson. The note urges employees to speak to an advocacy group. Anthem’s note asks employees to write or call Congress and encourage them to “pass responsible and sustainable health care reform.”

In most states, coercive communications with employees may be legal. In California, labor code prohibits such actions. WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross unit is the largest for-profit insurer in the state. It employs 8,000.