{"id":181391,"date":"2016-07-09T22:52:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-10T03:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/07\/09\/and-he-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-too-if-it-werent-for-that-meddling-journalist\/"},"modified":"2016-07-09T22:52:00","modified_gmt":"2016-07-10T03:52:00","slug":"and-he-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-too-if-it-werent-for-that-meddling-journalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/07\/09\/and-he-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-too-if-it-werent-for-that-meddling-journalist\/","title":{"rendered":"And He Would Have Gotten Away with It Too, If It Weren’t for That Meddling Journalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Sirota has been all over the conflicts of interest and corruption at the heart of the proposed merger between the health insurers Anthem and Cigna<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Late last week, there was some notable news in the arcane world of insurance regulation: Connecticut\u2019s state comptroller, Kevin Lembo, called<\/a> on Insurance Department Commissioner Katharine Wade to recuse herself from a review of the proposed merger of the nation\u2019s second- and fourth-largest insurers, Anthem and Cigna, in which the state has a lead role. \u201cThe revelations and repeated reports about your financial, personal and professional ties to Cigna,\u201d Lembo wrote<\/a> to Wade, \u201cwill make it challenging for the Connecticut public to view the review process of the Anthem-Cigna merger as fair and transparent.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lembo\u2019s letter marked the latest turn in a controversy that, while building for more than a year, has come to a head over the past month\u2014driven in substantial part by the ongoing reporting of David Sirota, the Denver-based senior investigations editor for the International Business Times. On June 1, Sirota published<\/a> a lengthy piece weaving together previously-known and new concerns over conflicts of interest surrounding the merger review: Wade, appointed to her role in 2015 by Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, is a former longtime Cigna lobbyist, her husband is a top Cigna lawyer, her father-in-law works for a law firm that lobbies for Cigna, and her mother worked for Cigna as recently as 2013. Wade\u2019s brother, Sirota reported, also \u201cpreviously worked as a counsel\u201d for Cigna. Further, after reviewing more than a decade\u2019s worth of campaign finance data, Sirota showed that Anthem, Cigna, and Cigna\u2019s lobbying firm gave more than $2 million to groups linked to Gov. Malloy, with much of that money coming since 2015.<\/span> <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since then, Sirota has produced<\/a> more than a dozen follow-ups on the topic\u2014tracking, for example, grassroots groups<\/a> and state legislators<\/a> calling on Malloy to remove Wade from the merger review\u2014as what he initially envisioned as a \u201cgood little blog item\u201d turned into an investigative series.<\/span> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 Unfortunately, IBT is suffering financial difficulties, so go to their Political Capital<\/a> page, and clock on their ads.<\/p>\n

Seriously though, this coverage is kicking some major ass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Sirota has been all over the conflicts of interest and corruption at the heart of the proposed merger between the health insurers Anthem and Cigna: Late last week, there was some notable news in the arcane world of insurance regulation: Connecticut\u2019s state comptroller, Kevin Lembo, called on Insurance Department Commissioner Katharine Wade to recuse …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1045,1111,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-insurance","category-monopoly","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}