Month: June 2022

Self-insured employers have been fighting the good fight against runaway health costs for their companies and for their workers for decades, without much help from state and national politicians. But a ray of sunshine has emerged: the courts.

A cause-driven law firm, Fairmark Law, has filed a federal class-action law suit in Wisconsin on behalf of self-insured employers and their employees against one of the state’s biggest hospital conglomerates, Advocate Aurora Health. The firm is charging monopolization and price gouging. The David versus Goliath suit was filed in the name of a small company, Uriel Pharmacy based in East Troy, Wisconsin.

The Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) of big hospital corporations and giant health care insurers has increased its rates close to 8% per year over the last two decades. That gouging has had the cumulative effect of raising the cost of care for a family of four to $22,000 to $30,000, depending on which consultant is keeping score.

In contrast, the most astutely managed company health plans have limited inflation to 2% to 3% per year. Total costs for a family can run $12,000 to $14,000 per year. That’s still expensive, but not outrageously so. (Note: The pure medical side of American health can be exemplary.)

That massive cost discrepancy is at the heart of the Fairmark case against Advocate Aurora.

Fairmark looks at the courts as one way to overcome anti-competitive contracting and imbalance of power between smaller payers and the Medical Industrial Complex.

Its Wisconsin case will be buttressed by a recent Rand Corp. analysis that ranks the state 4^th highest in the country in comparison to Medicare payments. Our hospitals charge private companies three times what they pay Medicare.

Advocate Aurora Health has a monster merger in the works with Atrium Health of North Carolina. It’s hard to see any operating synergies between those two distant operations. But the combination would gain leverage for higher prices with the nation’s largest health insurers.

The recently-selected chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission said Monday he hopes to help restore voter’s faith in the state’s elections.

Republican attorney Don Millis was appointed to the WEC on June 8 by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. Two days later, the six-member board selected him as its new chair.

In an appearance on WPR’s “The Morning Show,” Millis said he wants to “return to a time in which people could rely on or have faith in the election process.” He said “safeguards” such as voter ID and a statewide voter registration did not prevent challenges to the results of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

“I think there’s less faith in the confidence that elections, election results reflect the true vote than at any time in our history,” Millis said.

Millis laid out his ideas for using federal funding to increase audits of voting machines following elections. He said his goal would be an audit of 10 percent of voting machines statewide after each general election.

“That’s a process in which you rerun the ballots and then you hand count the ballots to see what the error rate (is),” Millis said.

In 2018 and 2020, those random audits covered about 5 percent of voting equipment across the state. Neither audit found issues or anomalies with the machines checked.

“There’s a couple reasons for (auditing),” Millis said. “One is to make sure that the machines are running properly. The other is educational, because despite the best efforts of our clerks, often people will not make marks the way they should.”

An energy grid operator for the first time is warning power companies in Wisconsin of the possibility of rolling blackouts this summer.

Midwest Independent System Operator power grid issued the alert to the state’s electricity providers.

MISO’S notice is a regional alert and WPS spokesman Matt Cullen said steps would be taken in the event of an emergency, but it’s unlikely to happen in the Badger State.

“It’s never come to the point where MISO has ordered us to reduce the amount of electricity that we are delivering,” Cullen said.

Wisconsin Public Service has more than 450,000 electric customers and more than 333,000 natural gas customers in 27 counties in eastern, northeastern northern, and central Wisconsin, and a small portion of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Midcontinent Independent System Operator is an independent, not-for-profit organization that delivers electric power across 15 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Manitoba.

Kohl’s Corporation has entered exclusive negotiations with retail store operator Franchise Group, Inc. over a potential sale of the department store chain, valuing it at nearly $8 billion, the companies said late on Monday. The bid of $60 per share constitutes a premium to Kohl’s closing price of $42.12 on Monday, giving it a market value of about $5.4 billion.

Franchise Group, owner and operator of retail stores such as The Vitamin Shoppe and Buddy’s Home Furnishings, said the companies have entered into a three-week-long exclusive discussion.

“The purpose of the exclusive period is to allow FRG and its financing partners to finalize due diligence and financing arrangements and for the parties to complete the negotiation of binding documentation,” Kohl’s said.

Kohl’s said the deal is subject to board approval and provided no assurance that an agreement would be finalized.

The Wisconsin-based department store chain was under pressure after activist investors Macellum Advisors GP LLC and Engine Capital LP called on Kohl’s earlier this year to sell itself.