Doctor pushes back against insurer scrutiny

San Francisco Chronicle, May 26, 2009

Monterey, CA, physician Bradley Carpentier found himself spending so much time fighting with health insurers to get approvals for the treatments he prescribed for his patients that he decided to wage his own lobbying effort. Carpentier formed a new political action committee called Stop Practicing Medicine to target the long-standing practice of insurers hiring doctors to review physician decisions, even though the insurer-hired doctors had never seen or talked to the patient whose care they were scrutinizing.