Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
What are they afraid of?
The “they” in this case are the bigwigs at Vermont’s two health insurance companies and at the Green Mountain Care Board, chaired by the heretofore reasonable (as a state senator) Kevin Mullin.
Together they have conspired (or so it seems) to keep Mike Fisher from testifying at a board hearing to consider the requests for rate increases by the insurance companies.
Fisher is the head of the Vermont Office of the Health Care Advocate. That’s not a state agency, but the Legislature created it and funded it to represent consumers.
So let’s review: The board, a quasi-judicial state regulatory agency with the power to approve, modify or deny rate increase requests, receives from the companies seeking those increases formal motions to ban the testimony of the legislatively designated consumer advocate.
And on receipt of this motion, the state agency does not say, “Don’t be ridiculous; this is why we have a health care advocate,” but instead replies (in effect) “whatever you say, boss.”
All of which makes MVP Health Care and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont appear arrogant, blasé about adding to the financial woes of their customers, and hostile to democracy.
And makes the Green Mountain Care Board appear to be a lapdog of the industry it is supposed to be regulating.
In neither case is this likely to be the image these institutions wish to project.
Technically, the companies and the board might be right on the law. Fisher’s testimony was banned on the narrow grounds that (in the words of the Blue Cross/Blue Shield motion) Fisher was slated to “provide expert testimony and his expert opinion on the legislative history” of the laws dealing with health insurance rates, and “Vermont law requires the exclusion of opinion testimony.”
In plain English, the testimony Fisher planned to offer would not meet the definition of opinion – “a belief or conclusion not substantiated by positive knowledge,” according to the dictionary.
Fisher has positive knowledge. He was in the Legislature and helped write the law being applied. His conclusions would not be mere opinion, except perhaps in Vermont law.
Another reason that banning Fisher’s expert testimony was bone-headed – or “pretty silly” in Fisher’s own words – is that his argument that the proposed rate hikes are too high is going to be put before the Green Mountain Care Board anyway.
“We’re at the table,” Fisher said. “My team had the opportunity to get across” the argument that the proposed rate increases are too high for many Vermonters to afford.
And it apparently never occurred to the insurance company VIPs that trying to block Fisher’s testimony was only likely to convince the average Vermonter that he and his team are right. (Fisher was allowed to testify as a rebuttal witness during MVP’s hearing on Tuesday.)
By now most regulated companies know that the best approach to opponents is to ignore them, not to call attention to them. Just as most regulatory bodies know how easy it is to hear from all sides and then simply ignore some of the testimony.
Why the insurance companies and the board leadership were ignorant of these strategies remains a mystery. Perhaps there is something in the Vermont air or water these days because indifference or ignorance about how one is being perceived seems common. For instance:
• Vermont Law School earlier this month clumsily announced that it would strip tenure from three-quarters of its faculty, apparently unaware that prospective students, of whom the college needs more, might find the move a reason to matriculate elsewhere.
• Eileen Whalen, president and chief operating officer of the University of Vermont Medical Center, told a radio interviewer that the dispute between her hospital and its nurses centered on the nurses “being valued … when people don’t feel valued, money or wages become a problem.” Even after her interviewer, VPR’s Jane Lindholm, adroitly asked whether the best way to value people would be to pay them what they are worth, Whalen, undeterred, repeated the phrase a few minutes later. Some people don’t know when they should be deterred.
• Reacting to a new poll showing most Vermonters favor gun control laws, Bob DePino, vice president of Gun Owners of Vermont, said “public opinion should not drive legislation,” revealing some confusion over how democracy is supposed to work.
In the matter of the Mike Fisher testimony, the health insurance companies might have been victimized by a variation of Parkinson’s Law, which holds that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
In this variation, work – or the product of workers – expands to fill the time of the workers employed in each specialty. The insurance companies have lawyers. They have to have something to do to prove to themselves and their bosses that they are necessary and that there are not too many of them.
Pondering the impending hearing, one or more of the lawyers notices the statute requiring “exclusion of opinion testimony” in these matters and suggests that Fisher’s testimony could be defined as opinion. Presto! A motion to exclude, which for reasons which defy explanation is upheld by the board.
Raising the question of what they all fear. That Fisher would reveal some deep, dark secret about the companies that would threaten their existence or profitability?
No, he has no such secrets. He only wants to make the case that, in his view, the proposed rate hikes are excessive. The insurance companies and the board just gave him a bigger megaphone. Mike Fisher is having a good week. His adversaries in this case seem too dense to understand that.
