News & Observer, North Carolina:Maybe it was just lousy timing, but many customers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina are ticked off at the mail they've received recently from the state's largest insurer.
First, they learned their rates will rise by an average of 11 percent next year.
Next, they opened a slick flier from the insurer urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid note to Sen. Kay Hagan denouncing what the company says is unfair competition that would be imposed by a government-backed insurance plan. The so-called public option is likely to be considered by Congress in the health-care overhaul debate.
"No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it's a slippery slope to a single-payer system," the BCBS flier read. "Who wants that?"
After the accompanying rise in rates? Pretty much everyone.
"I hope it backfires," said one customer. "I'm doing everything I can to make sure it does."
"I went sort of bonkers," said another. "You're hostage to them, and then they pull this. My new premiums are funding lobbying against competition. It's pretty disgusting."
A spokesperson for Hagan's office says they haven't gotten any of the insurer's pre-printed, postage-paid notes, the paper reports, "but he said lots of people have been calling to voice outrage at the insurer's tactics."
I'd imagine. Kay Hagan -- a Democrat -- was the sole holdout against a public option on the Senate HELP Committee (before she relented), so they may see her as on the fence about it. But it's hard to imagine that this clumsy and poorly thought out effort would make her more likely to side with them now. It's hard to imagine anything MoveOn.org could do would demonstrate so well just how thoughtless and bureaucratic insurers can be. In trying to work for their own cause, they've managed to throw support in the opposite direction.
If this is how BCBS runs its public relations campaigns, imagine just how screwed up they are in dealing with their customers' policies.
