Greg Ganske: “reclaiming my time, practically speaking, what has happened is this: we have seen a number of HMO abuses around the…”

“reclaiming my time, practically speaking, what has happened is this: we have seen a number of HMO abuses around the country. Eighty percent of the public thinks that Congress should do something to fix this problem. Almost everybody knows a friend or a family member or a fellow worker, an employee who has not been treated fairly and gotten the type of treatment that they need. There are two approaches to fixing this. The first approach is a regulatory approach. When Congress took away from the States for employer plans the ability to oversee the quality of those health plans, those insurance plans through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, it basically left a vacuum. It did not fill in that traditional State oversight by a State insurance commissioner, and so people, most of the people in this country who are working get their insurance from their employer. Most of them are surprised to know that if their State legislature has passed some type of patient protection, it probably does not even apply to them. So what we did back in October was, we started to fill in the gaps in terms of patients being treated with due process, the regulatory gap at the Federal level.”