Mission Over Everything

You have a lot of influence. Not only is Blue Shield of California, one of the nation’s largest non-profit health insurers, you’re often called upon to testify before lawmakers on some of the most complex, highly-charged health care issues of our day. How do you use your influence to advance people toward Blue Shield’s vision and goals?

Well, we really pride ourselves on focusing on when we engage elected officials, appointed officials, we’re always doing it on behalf of the mission. And 99.9% of lobbying is all about the self-interest of that organization. We tend to avoid that. We tend to really focus on things that we think are good policy, even if at times, they may be run contrary to our immediate business interests.
And I’ll give you an example: before the Affordable Care Act came into place, health plans started to offer policies to individual customers that did not cover maternity. Because people could sign up for insurance, get pregnant, have a child and get off insurance. It wasn’t profitable. And so, they said, “We’re not going to cover maternity.” We thought that was just unconscionable. How can you have a health care policy and not cover maternity?

One of the biggest health events in anybody’s life, in a woman’s life.

Yeah.

Fathers too, for that matter.

Yeah. So, we continued to do that for a while. But the problem was, if everybody else wasn’t going to do it and only we were, we were going to get clobbered financially. So, we went and lobbied the state government with a mandate on maternity that would require all of us to cover it. Even though it made our product more expensive, it made us less competitive in terms of our positioning. It was not in our immediate business interest, but it was the right thing to do. It was the right policy to cover.
So, one of the reasons I think we get asked as much as we do to have these conversations is people now know that when we show up, we are really trying to advocate for things that we think are good policy for the health care system, as opposed to just good for Blue Shield of California tomorrow and next week.