Stories I’d like to see

Scoping out the new election economy:

No matter what you think about the court decisions, including Citizens United, that have unraveled campaign-finance restrictions, it’s clear that the resulting gusher of contributions has created an industry of breathtaking scale.

Estimates now put overall federal campaign spending for 2012 at about $6 billion - more than half of Hollywood’s entire box-office gross last year. And that’s only for presidential and congressional campaigns.

So it’s time for a comprehensive report, perhaps from the Wall Street Journal or Reuters or BloombergBusinessweek, on Elections Inc.

Who are the biggest players among the consultants, ad agencies and ad buyers, mail-order houses, pollsters and media companies? (I noticed that Gannett attributed much of its improved earnings this quarter to political ads on its local television outlets.)

And can we see sidebar profiles of the three or four biggest Election Inc. moguls – the ones who are making a fortune taking salaries and fees to deploy all of this money?

1. When health insurers say no:

Like probably every other family in America, ours regularly has claims we submit to our health insurer rejected — with little or no explanation and no recourse from the company’s always-on-hold telephone hot line. Yet lately I’ve been seeing ads from health insurers projecting friendly, caring images. My favorite is the television and print campaign from United HealthCare featuring a girl who develops asthma but is shown swimming and even surfing because United, which sells insurance under the Oxford and other brands, has gotten her “specialists, lots of doctors, lots of advice…that help her pediatrician coordinate your child’s care and make sure all doctors are on the same page….” The ad trumpets United’s “more than 78,000 people looking out for 70 million Americans. That’s HEALTH IN NUMBERS,” the ad concludes.

Speaking of numbers, what percentage of customer claims for medical care or prescription drugs does United HealthCare reject? How does that compare with its competitors? Why can’t some reporters ask?

A cursory search on Google turns up little more than a 2009 Huffington Post piece reporting that: “Data on how often insurance claims are denied — and for what reasons — is collected and analyzed by the insurance companies themselves. But except in California, the companies aren’t required to provide those records to any state or federal agency.” The article quotes Karen Pollitz, a professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, as saying: “The number is knowable, but not known by regulators or policy makers or patients.”