Question: If you are WellCare Health Plans, Inc. (Florida’s largest HMO in charge of administering Medicaid and Medicare programs), how many laws do you have to break before you lose your huge state contracts?
Answer:
It depends upon:
(a) Which politicians you give campaign contributions to;
(b) The amount of fines that you agree to pay;
(c) Who the Florida Attorney General is (formerly Charlie Crist, and now, Bill McCollum);
(d) Whether any Floridians are paying attention or even care; or
(e) All of the above.
We don’t yet know how many laws will have to be broken before the State will fire WellCare, but sadly, the Answer as to how Wellcare has managed to keep their contracts in place is (e)—All of the above.
The Form 10-Q Report filed by WellCare on 7/29/09 shows: (1) WellCare agreed to pay an $80 million dollar fine in May, 2009 for defrauding the State of Florida out of $40 million dollars; (2) WellCare settled an SEC investigation of alleged securities laws violations by paying a $10 million dollar fine; (3) WellCare has estimated that other pending Federal investigations may cost $60 million dollars to resolve; (4) Through June, 2009, WellCare had spent approximately $148 million dollars in “administrative expenses” (including legal fees and accounting fees) associated with or consequential to these governmental investigations.
The Form 10-Q doesn’t include the company’s revelation in August that WellCare has agreed to pay a $120,000 fine to the Florida Elections Commission because of 142 illegal campaign contributions. Look at the list of recipients in Howard Troxler’s St. Petersburg Times article on August 23, 2009. (Only one Democrat received a contribution, whereas all of the other illegal contributions were to Republicans in elective state offices, because the State of Florida is in Republican control.)
When are voters in Florida going to wake up and realize that this is what you get when your Republican state elected officials outsource these “services” to a for-profit private health insurer to “manage” public health care programs? How much money which should have been available to provide healthcare to children, the elderly, and the poor has instead has been diverted to pay for other corporate expenses that have nothing to do with providing health care, but only have to do with protecting the corporation from criminal liability.
Oh, but wait, there's more--there's supposed to be a "watch dog"--an "Independent Monitor" for WellCare to make sure it does what it is supposed to do under its criminal plea bargain.
The Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) that WellCare signed with the US Attorneys' Office on May 5 provided that WellCare would have an Independent Monitor appointed within 60 days to monitor WellCare’s compliance with the law and the DPA. The U.S. Attorneys' office is supposed to approve of the person to be appointed as the Independent Monitor, and WellCare is supposed to pay the cost of the Monitor.
Why has no Monitor been appointed yet?
And, more importantly, when you realize that the primary source of WellCare’s income is the administrative fees received from the public tax dollars which fund Medicare and Medicaid, why are taxpayers indirectly spending money to act as a watchdog for this company?
Wake up, voters, and pay attention to these abuses that outsourcing produces. It's time to demand accountability from these outsourcers and the politicians who continue to reward them with government contracts.
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