Letter by Tia Goss Sawhney

Attached is a letter that I wrote to America's Health Insurance Plans regarding research reports that they published in 2007 and 2005. AHIP is a national trade association representing 1,300 member health insurance companies. For reasons that I detail in the letter, I feel that the reports do not give our government leaders and members of the public the quality information that they need as we engage in healthcare debate.

The AHIP reports referred to in the letter are found at:

http://www.ahipresearch.org/pdfs/Individual_Market_Survey_December_2007.pdf
http://www.ahipresearch.org/pdfs/Individual_Insurance_Survey_Report8-26-...

On May 1, 2008 I had a follow-up phone call with

1. Jeff Lemieux – SVP for AHIP’s Center for Research and Policy and Author of the 2007 Report
2. Thomas Wildsmith – Consulting Actuary and Author of 2005 Report
3. Rod Turner – AHIP Staff Actuary

It was a professional and cordial conversation. I appreciate their time. They did not object to the factual/technical merit of any of my observations. We talked about how my comments can be used to improve AHIP’s future reports. They seem willing to make a number of changes.

Unfortunately, however, these two reports are currently in the public domain and presented in such a way that I feel they have the potential to misinform the healthcare debate.