Maybe Doctor Patient Unity does have doctors among its membership. Dr. Jon Pearse, M.D., who has a family practice in Concord, New Hampshire, is not one of them. Then again, it’s hard to know who is a member of that shadowy dark money group.
If you live in a state with a senator up for re-election next year, and you watch TV on the major broadcast or cable channels, you’ve probably seen an ad paid for by Doctor Patient Unity predicting dire consequences if the bipartisan bill S. 1895 is signed into law.
One ad has an “earnest woman” advocating against “government rate setting.” The other ad is a little masterpiece of screenwriting and production: two heroic paramedics bring a critically injured patient into a hospital that has suddenly gone dark.
Dr. Pearse has seen at least one of the ads, and he wrote an op-ed for his hometown paper, the Concord Monitor:
The political ad by Doctor Patient Unity regarding government rate setting (bipartisan legislation in the Senate) is completely misleading.
Cloaked as an appeal to protect patients from profiteering insurance companies, it actually is entirely the opposite. It is an attempt to protect the current practice by providers of emergency and emergency-related services of charging rates up to 300% of those paid by insurers (often referred to as in-network rates).
The “surprise” medical bills referred to in the ad are not insurance billing – they are extremely high rates charged by the providers, over and above what insurers pay (if one has insurance). What the insurer doesn’t pay is billed directly to the patient, who most often is totally unaware that the work done or referred by the ER is “out of network” and will result in budget-breaking billing.
Not that I like insurers too much, but it does seem like in this case they do have a healthy self-interest in knowing what the going rate is for various medical procedures, supplies and equipment.
Karl Evers-Hillstrom in his article for OpenSecrets.org notes that the ads are mostly targeting Republicans, but also some Democrats, like Senator Doug Jones (D-Alabama). The article does not mention Senator Gary Peters (D-Michigan), but I can attest that Doctor Patient Unity is running ads in metro Detroit urging viewers to tell Peters to vote against government rate setting.
Dr. Pearse also brings up the issue of where these ads are running.
Why is this ad being run only in states where select incumbents are up for re-election? A determined web search will reveal almost nothing about Doctor Patient Unity: Who, what or where they really are just isn’t out there.
It sounds that, like other people, he has run into a wall trying to find out who is actually in the group. I can find a lot more information about Dr. Pearse than I can about Janna Rutland, the apparent treasurer for Doctor Patient Unity.
For one thing, I can tell you that Dr. Pearse did his residency at an Air Force clinic. The good doctor does have his share of “Google-gangers,” but it wasn’t too difficult for me to find the right one. Unlike Janna Rutland, who also has Google-gangers but I can’t be sure which one is the one I’m looking for.
Apparently, Dr. Pearse tried the tack of seeing how to donate to Doctor Patient Unity.
I see no appeal for grassroots donation by this organization. Clearly they have all the donations they need, which one can only surmise are based on who will profit. The whole thing just doesn’t make sense any other way.
Dr. Pearse closes his op-ed with a clear-eyed assessment of what Doctor Patient Unity is trying to accomplish here:
Making decisions on advertising, or short social media posts, risks co-option to someone else’s agenda. This ad is a classic example of such an effort.
I have not read S. 1895 too thoroughly, and I seriously doubt it’s anywhere close to a perfect solution. But if it’s got a secretive group spending millions of dollars on ads trying to intimidate lawmakers, the bill is probably not too bad.