State accuses Blue Shield of illegal cancellations
Calling the allegations "serious violations that completely undermine the public's trust in our healthcare delivery system and are potentially devastating to patients," Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said he would announce today that he would seek a $12.6-million fine.
Blue Shield called the charges "grossly unfair" and vowed to vigorously contest them and the proposed fine.
In a statement issued to The Times on Wednesday, Duncan Ross, president of Blue Shield of California Life & Health Insurance Co., said "we are outraged by the excessive penalties for nonsubstantive issues," and called the actions "a radical departure from the [Department of Insurance's] widely accepted and long-standing interpretation of the law."
"The department's position penalizes practices that have previously been approved by the department and have been followed for years by all health insurers," Ross said.
The company has long maintained that its cancellation practices follow the law and are an important guard against insurance fraud. In any event, the company has said, only a small portion of its policies are affected.
The enforcement action is based on an investigation of Blue Shield of California Life & Health, which covers about 167,000 people in individual and group policies licensed by the Department of Insurance.
The action does not include another Blue Shield unit that has about 2.3 million members in health maintenance organizations overseen by the Department of Managed Health Care. The state's HMO regulator is conducting a separate investigation of the company's cancellation practices that is expected to be completed early next year.
CIA failed to fully inform Congress on tapes, director says
WASHINGTON -- CIA Director Michael V. Hayden acknowledged Wednesday that the agency failed to keep key congressional committees adequately informed of the CIA's decision to destroy videotapes of secret interrogations."I think that it's fair to say that, particularly at the time of the destruction, we could have done an awful lot better in keeping the committee alerted and informed as to that activity," Hayden said in brief remarks after a three-hour meeting with the House Intelligence Committee on the tapes controversy.
Hayden's comment appeared to be a retreat from his initial statement on the matter last week, when he told the CIA's workforce in a written memo that congressional oversight committees had known of the agency's intention to dispose of the tapes and were notified after they were destroyed.
Hayden's acknowledgment comes at a time when the director has been on a public relations campaign touting the agency's commitment to congressional oversight as part of an effort to build public trust in the CIA's handling of its activities in the war on terrorism.
The leaders of the House Intelligence Committee chastised the CIA for failing to keep the panel informed on a series of issues, including the creation and subsequent destruction of videotapes showing agency operatives using harsh interrogation techniques on Al Qaeda operatives.
"There is a tremendous amount of frustration," said Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the committee chairman. "We feel, on a bipartisan level, that our committee was not informed, has not been kept informed, and we are very frustrated about that issue."
EMPIRE
Rupert Murdoch won his long-coveted prize Thursday when shareholders of Dow Jones & Company gave their blessing to a takeover by Mr. Murdoch’s global media empire, the News Corporation.
The vote gives Mr. Murdoch control over The Wall Street Journal, one of the world’s most respected newspapers. It was also the last act of ownership by the Bancroft family, a deeply private group that had held a controlling stake in Dow Jones for 105 years.
A few hours after the vote, Mr. Murdoch appeared in The Journal’s offices in Lower Manhattan to assure Dow Jones employees that while they might be nervous about the change, his aim was to make The Journal better and more competitive. Standing in the main newsroom, he told hundreds of employees — some listening in by phone — that he understood “the very high bar you’ve set for yourselves.” He added, “If anything, you’ll find we set a higher bar.”
The legal and operational handoff from one company to the other was already taking place by midday. Several high-level Dow Jones executives, including the publisher, L. Gordon Crovitz, were told to vacate their offices by day’s end, and in some cases their successors are expected to be in place Friday morning, according to Dow Jones officials who were briefed on the matter.
Mr. Murdoch was accompanied in the newsroom by two of those successors: Robert J. Thomson, editor of The Times of London, is the new publisher of The Journal, and Les Hinton, executive chairman of the British papers of the News Corporation, will head all of Dow Jones as it is integrated into its new parent.
“While it’s right to be respectful of the past, these days it’s certainly fatal to be haunted by history,” Mr. Thomson said. “He who stands still will be overrun.”
The newsroom’s leader, Marcus W. Brauchli, managing editor of The Journal, is staying on. He did not speak and was not acknowledged by Mr. Murdoch.
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