Greg Ganske: “I want to speak about HMO reform and about campaign finance reform today. Let me start out with HMO reform. A few years…”

“I want to speak about HMO reform and about campaign finance reform today. Let me start out with HMO reform. A few years ago down in Texas, the Texas Legislature passed a series of HMO reform bills almost unanimously in their State legislature. These bills addressed issues like emergency room care. If you had a crushing chest pain and thought you were going to have a heart attack, you could go to the emergency room and then the HMO could not come back and say afterwards if the EKG was normal, well, we are not going to pay for this. The Texas legislature addressed issues like access to specialists. They addressed issues like when an HMO would say we do not think that that treatment that your doctor and your specialist have recommended is medically necessary and then deny that care just arbitrarily. So they held a big debate in Texas. This was now about 3 or 4 years ago. And the Texas legislature passed a series of bills, some of them almost unanimously, without dissenting vote I think in the Texas Senate and maybe with only two dissenting votes in the Texas House, sent those bills to the governor's desk, and he allowed them to become law. At that time, the HMO industry in Texas said the sky would fall, the sky would fall. You will see a plethora of lawsuits; you will see premiums go out of sight; you will see the HMO industry in Texas shrivel up and move away. Well, what has been the actual result?”