Consumer Watchdog fights to protect patients, improve health care quality and create universal care. We believe the health of patients should come before the financial wealth of health insurance companies, drug companies and other profit-driven health care corporations. We work toward a safer, affordable health care system by eliminating waste, fraud and profiteering.
In the mid to late 1990s, Consumer Watchdog pioneered the nation’s toughest HMO patients’ rights law. During the 2000s, we uncovered outrageous practices by health insurance companies that resulted in some of the strongest protections under Obamacare. These include the bans on preexisting condition limitations, medical underwriting and the ability of insurance companies to revoke policies for innocent omissions on enrollment forms.
Our current fights include campaigns to reduce the price of prescription drugs, implement a Medicare for all system and lower health insurance rates through proven regulation that has saved drivers and home owners hundreds of billions of dollars on their insurance rates in California.
By Jeremy B. White, POLITICO
March 18, 2020
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/18/no-one-has-…
SAN FRANCISCO — As Californians raided hand sanitizer and wipes to battle the spread of the coronavirus last week, Fred Kimball pivoted to make a different kind of bulk purchase: 300,000 pens.
Bakersfield, CA – The family of 28-year-old Sabrina De La Rosa should be celebrating the birth of her baby boy Jaxx with Sabrina surrounded by her loving friends and family. Instead, they are holding fundraisers to raise money to hold memorial services for the young mother of four. Nine months pregnant De La Rosa was taken to Memorial Hospital – Bakersfield with labor pains. Her family anxiously awaited the arrival of her child. Instead, her family was left in shock when Baby Jaxx was brought into the world without his mother Sabrina to care for him.
Last week SB 325, a bill by Senator Jerry Hill to require the state of California to license and oversee outpatient substance abuse treatment centers, faced its first test in the legislature. It passed the Senate Health Committee unanimously.
Sacramento, CA – Starting today, California doctors will have to check a patient’s prescription history before prescribing addictive opioids and other controlled substances.
Sacramento, CA -- Doctors in California will have to be honest with their patients if they are on probation for sexual assault or other egregious patient harm under legislation, SB 1448 by Senator Jerry Hill, that was signed by the Governor today.
Sacramento, CA – California would be the first state in the nation to mandate doctors tell their patients when they are disciplined for sexual assault or other patient harm under legislation that passed the Assembly and Senate today and goes to Governor Brown's desk.
Los Angeles, CA -- This morning, health insurance Goliath Aetna sued the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog and Whatley Kallas LLP, a consumer law firm, who’ve sued Aetna for its improper and negligent disclosure of the HIV positive status of thousands of its members. The disclosure was made as a result of Aetna’s use of a window pane envelope that was sent to communicate a member-wide business practice change Aetna agreed to make in order to resolve an earlier lawsuit brought by the consumer advocates.
Santa Monica, CA -- The White House’s executive order today seeking to allow for more “Association Health Plans” could turn the clock back to days when patients faced unlimited medical bills even when they played by the rules, the nonprofit nonpartisan group Consumer Watchdog said today.
Consumer Watchdog fought off previous proposals that allowed for the sale of more such policies that promise lower costs but deliver junk health insurance plans that can leave patients with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills.
Santa Monica, CA – The California Supreme Court today issued a decision affirming the right of the Medical Board of California to use the state prescription drug database to protect patients from incompetent and negligent doctors, and to prevent dangerous and illegal prescribing of opioids and other powerful medications.
Washington D.C. -- Any national health reform compromise that allows
states to adopt ineffective health care "co-ops" should also allow
states to adopt highly effective single-payer systems, according to
Consumer Watchdog. According to Politico.com, the new version of the House health care
reform legislation developed by the Energy and Commerce Committee will
include a provisions allowing state to create co-ops for residents to
buy private insurance.
