Health insurers are facing renewed fire from Obama and Democrats, but are still mostly on board with the president's effort to overhaul the healthcare system. During a town-hall meeting in Raleigh, NC, President Obama took aim at insurers as a way of selling his health plan. He said he wants to forbid insurers from denying coverage to people because they have a pre-existing illness, cap consumers' out-of-pocket medical costs, and provide preventive care at no additional cost.
For more than a year, the American Medical Association has been drafting a new ethics policy aiming to limit industry influence on continuing education for doctors. But the organization's House of Delegates has rejected two proposals, and its ethics committee will take up the issue again in late August.
Massachusetts trimmed its plan to provide healthcare for virtually all its residents when the legislature failed to restore enough money to the budget to provide full benefits for 30,000 legal immigrants. Last month, to help close a gaping deficit, the legislature eliminated health insurance for the immigrants. The vote restored $40 million, or about 30%, leaving unclear just how much care the affected immigrants would qualify for. Those affected are
permanent residents who have had green cards for less than five years.
Thousands of locals gathered at a pep rally in Western Connecticut one evening in summer 2008, but it wasn't in support of a nearby sports team. They were rallying in support of the Heart Center of Greater Waterbury, which the government was threatening to close.
The Heart Center, which was a joint operation between Waterbury Hospital and Saint Mary's Hospital, opened in 2005 on a trial basis and was charged with meeting a certain number of procedures to attain permanent status. Connecticut Office of Health Care Access (OHCA) officials notified hospital executives in August 2008 that the Heart Center was scheduled to close for not meeting that quota.
"This was a life-and-death situation because closing it down would create a further distance that people have to travel to get immediate critical care," says Gary Griffin, director of PR at Avon, CT–based Adams & Knight, Inc., an advertising agency that worked with Waterbury and Saint Mary's to keep the Heart Center open. "The first people we needed to inform was the community."
So hospital marketers worked with their agency to create an integrated campaign to save the center. A key to the campaign's success in saving the Heart Center was the amount and consistency of the media coverage it received.
"From the day the pep rally started, all news stations and newspapers were out there covering us," says Heather Tindall, director of PR, media relations, and marketing at Waterbury Hospital. "The media just threw themselves behind this as well because they too saw this would be a travesty if this place closed down."
Marianne Aiello is an editor with HealthLeaders Media. She may be reached at maiello@hcpro.com.
The Web has changed the rules for press releases, according to this post on Jeffbullas's Blog. Today, savvy marketing professionals use press releases to reach buyers directly, according to the blog posting.
In its recent review of rules governing advertising endorsements and testimonials, the Federal Trade Commission cast a critical eye on the rapidly growing instance of bloggers reviewing products and services provided to them at no cost by public relations professionals and other product marketers, according to this blog posting. The practice sparked the proposal of new FTC guidelines that would require bloggers to disclose any exchange of value that results in editorial coverage, so that readers can assess for themselves the information's bias, accuracy, and usefulness.