Backers of Health Initiatives Assail Opponents’ TV Ads

Californians are facing a new round of TV advertisements from the insurance and hospital industries warning of dire consequences if two health care reform initiatives that these businesses oppose are approved by voters in November.

The ads, which feature an image of someone scribbling notes on a legal pad, warn that Propositions 214 and 216 will mean more government regulation of health care, “hundreds of millions in new taxes” and that “families [will] pay $1,000 more in health insurance premiums every year.”

But on Monday, proponents of the two competing measures, Propositions 214 and 216, branded the industry ads as “a flat-out lie” and called on television stations to stop airing them.

The Proposition 214 campaign said it will ask network and cable stations to stop airing the commercials by Taxpayers Against Higher Health Costs, the industry coalition trying to defeat the measures.

Deah Hohn, California director for Neighbor-to-Neighbor, a health care advocacy group backing Proposition 214, said the opponents’ ads are misleading because they portray both measures as having the same negative consequences: more government regulation and higher taxes and medical insurance premiums for consumers.

“To say we would raise taxes by millions of dollars is patently untrue,” Hohn said.

Proposition 214 would impose more modest regulations on the health industry than Proposition 216. For example, Proposition 216 would enact taxes on HMOs, hospitals and other medical businesses; Proposition 214 would not create any direct taxes.

“The $1,000 in additional insurance premiums per year is a complete fantasy,” said Harvey Rosenfield, a consumer activist backing Proposition 216.

A state legislative analyst who has projected that the two measures could raise overall health care costs from “tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars” said last week that the cost impact of the two measures would be so modest that many people wouldn’t even notice it. Even if costs did increase in the hundreds of millions of dollars, it would be a small share of the $100 billion spent annually on medical costs in California.

Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a national health care charity based in Menlo Park, said the economic impact of the measures is “impossible to [estimate] with any reliability.”

“The opponents are controlling the airwaves and their strategy is to paint these two initiatives as the same, as being big government and big regulation in an anti-government era,” said Altman, whose charity is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente, the state’s largest HMO.

But Janet Maira, spokesman for the measures’ opponents, defended the ads’ charges as fair and accurate. She cited the results of an economic study commissioned by the campaign that concluded that the measures would increase overall health care costs by up to $2.7 billion a year.