Here's a challenge for Karin Weldin Stewart: MedExpress is Highmark, and that's a problem for both Delaware consumers and business people

See? MedExpress even has a guy
in a Blue Hen costume to go along
with bazillions in advertising.

So by now you have seen or heard all the advertisements for MedExpress, the "neighborly place" to get urgent medical care.

And as I have said elsewhere about them,

Whenever you hear a corporation (banks also come to mind here) talking about being a good neighbor, you know you need to hold onto your wallet.

But that's not specifically germane to the question of why our Insurance Commissioner should be interested in them.

What's germane is that MedExpress is a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield Highmark, the good folks who just bought out the BCBS franchise for Delaware. So for many of us, if we go to a MedExpress, no matter how friendly and how neighborly they may appear to be, we are really going to a subsidiary of our own insurance company for treatment.

This has some interesting implications, not just for patients, but also for other (some locally owned) urgent care centers around the state.

You see, among other things, according to what local physicians have told me, Highmark compensates other urgent care facilities seeing their patients at $120/visit, but gives preferential reimbursement to their own facilities at $150/visit.

Moreover, MedExpress seems to be strangely immune to some of the technical legal niceties regarding whether or not you can own the lab attached to your own urgent care facility, and similar arrangements.

To the owners of other urgent care facilities (which includes Christiana Care, owning four in the area), MedExpress has made no bones about the fact that these clinics are coming into Delaware to do "Wal-Mart" on them--to use their incestuous corporate edge to drive their own prices down (temporarily) and drive everybody else out of business.

Of course, you can make your own estimate of where prices will thereafter go.

I wonder where the insurance commissioner is when the major carrier in the state slops over into providing medical care and then gives itself preferential compensation rates?

Oh, wait. I forgot who the insurance commissioner is. Never mind.

A note to forestall certain comments: this is not a Libertarian whining for government intervention to correct the free market. There is no free market here, there is a government-regulated market. That's the only game in town. This is a Libertarian pointing out that the government regulators appearing to be failing miserably at their jobs, and--as a result (no surprise!)--are privileging large corporations over local business people and entrepreneurs.

You claim to be able to run these markets in the public interest? Then let's see you do it?

(And while you are at it, ask yourself whether the fact that Highmark/MedExpress is paying for massive advertising in the WNJ and on local radio has anything to do with why our dauntless media is not investigating this story.)

Final note: if you want to find out about a true good neighbor urgent care facility in Delaware, check out Dr. Vince Schaller's Hockessin Walk-in. Take five minutes to read about his operation and you will, frankly, drive right past the MedExpress the next time you need urgent care.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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