HellPartners - It doesn't amaze

HellPartners - It doesn't amaze me that HealthPartners has been caught doing the same shenanigans that Medica and Allina were several years ago.

Despite the dubious business purpose of many expenses, controls at Minnesota's third-largest health insurer failed to prevent spending on unnecessary trips, gifts, dinners and entertainment, according to Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch, whose office released the investigative findings Wednesday.

Hatch said HealthPartners had a corporate culture similar to the one he found during his 2001 investigation of Medica and Allina Health System.

He said all three nonprofits made it too easy to spend money on executive perks and niceties, creating a "culture of luxury."

Nope. Doesn't amaze me at all. It would amaze me if it didn't happen. Because the system in Minnesota is almost perfectly designed to create such scandal.

Here in Minnesota the state government has carried out a decades-long mission to squeeze out all private health insurance. Essentially, here in Minnesota today you have a choice of a couple of big HMOs and a few beleaguered fee-for-service insurers who've managed to hold out (but probably won't be able to for long). State mandates and policy have made it all but impossible for all but the biggest of the mega "non-profit" HMOs to survive in Minnesota.

So is it a wonder that the executives of these organizations, knighted by the state to further the state entitlement culture, feel "entitled" to wallow in the trough the state created, and filled for them?

Hatch said that "culture" was inconsistent with the nonprofits' core mission of serving the public. Allina and Medica spent more than HealthPartners on such things, he said.

"The health care system itself has to be more accountable," Hatch said.

And yet it doesn't add up to Hatch - this "incompatibility of culture" isn't an aberration of the current system. It's an unintended but inevitable result of the removal of the free market from the healthcare business.

Just as the Enron scandal was a product of Clinton-era policies, the HealthPartners and Allina scandals are the nearly-inevitable product of government meddling in the private market. And the problem is, dealing with HealthPartners will create a feel-good illusion of having "done something", having treated the symptoms - but leaving the disease untouched.

Posted by Mitch at January 16, 2003 07:10 AM