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Life & Times Transcript

1/02/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

We carry health insurance to pay our medical bills, but what happens when your policy is cancelled?

Tarsha Harris>> They're not about helping people. They're about trying to get out of paying a claim.

Chris Ohman>> Maybe there was a preexisting condition that was present and we should go back to the application to understand whether that was really clarified.

Val Zavala>> And then, it's gone from childhood toy to a dance and exercise craze. The hula hoop comes of age.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> They pay hundreds of dollars a month for individual health care policies and they think they're insured, but more and more people are discovering that their insurance companies can cancel those policies retroactively, leaving them with mountains of medical bills. Why is this happening? Sam Louie has the story of one woman who thought she was insured until --

Tarsha Harris>> These are all the medals from the events that I've participated in.

Sam Louie>> By all accounts, Tarsha Harris is healthy. She's an active thirty-six year old who loves to compete.

Tarsha Harris>> And this one was in 2001.

Sam Louie>> So she was surprised in May of 2005 when she was diagnosed with endometriosis. It's a common medical condition affecting about ninety million women around the world. With endometriosis, the kind of tissue that lines the uterus starts growing outside the womb in other areas of the body. For Tarsha, it showed up in her navel.

Tarsha Harris>> I was at work one day and my belly button started bleeding with blood in the area of that shirt. I went in the bathroom and checked it and my belly button was bleeding. Also, it was swelling up, so I went to seek medical help.

Sam Louie>> Doctors performed surgery and her navel was removed to prevent the tissue from spreading. She thought the problem was solved, but then several months later, her insurance company, Blue Cross of California, cancelled her policy. Tarsha felt betrayed.

Tarsha Harris>> They're not about helping people. They're about trying to get out of paying a claim that is valid.

Sam Louie>> Jerry Flanagan is with the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. He calls Tarsha's case part of an appalling trend. He's seen thousands of similar complaints.

Jerry Flanagan>> This is a classic "use it and lose it" health insurance strategy where, if you dare to get sick, the insurance company is going to cancel your coverage and you're going to be left with huge medical bills.

Sam Louie>> The cancellations affect only those with individual health care policies. They're purchased primarily by people who are independent contractors or those with no access to a company group plan. It's estimated that about two million Californians have individual health care policies.

Jerry Flanagan>> Because of the way that the economy has been in California over the last three or four years, more and more people are getting inadequate insurance from their employer or they're an outside contractor for a tech firm and they're buying health care on their own.

Sam Louie>> Anyone who wants to buy an individual policy has to fill out an extensive application listing any previous medical problems. Unlike company health plans, insurers can reject individual policies based on a preexisting health condition, but critics claim the insurers are abusing this interpretation.

Heather McKeon>> The minute we saw the facts, we were pretty sure that this is the exact mold of the cases we've been seeing more and more.

Sam Louie>> Heather McKeon is Tarsha's attorney. They're suing Blue Cross on grounds of bad faith. Blue Cross claims Tarsha hid a preexisting health condition.

Heather McKeon>> These people are being denied by their carrier on the grounds that, during the application process which could be several months prior to the injury, they misrepresented some fact regarding their health.

Sam Louie>> In Tarsha's case, it was a yeast infection. She says that, when she came down with the infection, it was treated and it went away. All of this happened before she applied for the policy. But several months after she bought the policy, it was cancelled. Blue Cross says "Rescission is a proper and appropriate legal action where someone has obtained health insurance through misrepresentation."

Tarsha Harris>> I was angry because they are basically saying I'm a liar and they're saying that I knew that I had this disease when, in fact, I've never had a trace of this disease.

Heather McKeon>> The question on the application simply states, "Have you seen a doctor for any care that has not yet been completed?" So she said no because, at the time she applied, the yeast infection had resolved itself.

Sam Louie>> So how does Blue Cross of California respond? We requested an interview with Blue Cross. They referred us to Chris Ohman, an industry spokesman and president of the California Association of Health Plans.

Chris Ohman>> It is true that sometimes a claim will come up maybe quickly after somebody has been enrolled which would suggest that maybe there was a preexisting condition that was present, and we should go back to the application to understand whether that was really clarified.

Sam Louie>> In Tarsha's case, her surgery triggered a review of her application. Ohman says that these complaints are few.

Chris Ohman>> I got a hundred eighty-nine complaints for 1.7 million folks who are insured. Each one of those complaints is a serious issue and we need to understand what it is.

Sam Louie>> Tarsha's attorney, Heather McKeon, says that it's the insurance application that's hard to understand.

Heather McKeon>> They use big words such as with the reproductive questions, endometriosis.

Sam Louie>> But Ohman says that there is help available in answering the questions.

Chris Ohman>> There are people at health plans that you can call on customer service lines who will help you fill out the application.

Sam Louie>> He says the goal is not to deny coverage, but to ensure that people with serious diseases are not trying to exploit the system.

Chris Ohman>> The main purpose would be just to make sure that an application was filled out completely and accurately.

Jerry Flanagan>> The law requires you to show that the patient lied. These companies are going back scouring medical records to look for any excuse for denying coverage.

Sam Louie>> Flanagan also points out that insurance companies are not only canceling policies, but doing so retroactively. That means patients are stuck with huge bills they thought were covered.

Jerry Flanagan>> The patient now is facing collections from doctors and hospitals that are looking to collect on hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

Sam Louie>> For Tarsha, those unpaid medical bills have added up to twenty thousand dollars. Insurance companies say they have to watch out for scammers if they're to keep the prices affordable.

Chris Ohman>> Our products are ten to seventeen percent cheaper than the national average. So what that tells me is that health plans are providing a good, robust product at a competitive price.

Sam Louie>> Consumer advocate, Jerry Flanagan, says that he expects more policy cancellations and complaints in the future.

Jerry Flanagan>> Insurance companies have greater market control. They know that they can deny coverage and the patients that are left uninsured have no choice but to go to the other mega insurance company that's doing the same thing.

Sam Louie>> So far, Blue Cross has settled seventy cases out of court for an undisclosed amount of money and the State Department of Managed Health Care is also investigating policy cancellations to see if the problem is systemic and in need of a major overhaul.

In the meantime, Tarsha's case is in arbitration. She's exercising, watching her diet and taking care of herself. She also has a new job and is waiting for her company-sponsored health coverage to kick in. But most of all, she's looking forward to putting her battle with Blue Cross behind her.

Tarsha Harris>> It was insulting and it just upsets me that people have to fight and a lot of people out there won't fight because they're tired.

Sam Louie>> I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> We know that, for women in Los Angeles County, life can be both difficult and promising, but it's hard to get that big picture. Well, that's where a new report on the status of women comes in from United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

If the nearly five million women and girls who live in Los Angeles County were reduced to a village of one hundred, thirty-four would be working full-time, thirty-three would have college degrees, eighteen would be living in poverty, six would own businesses of their own and one would be homeless.

These and other insightful facts and trends are brought together in a report by United Way of Greater Los Angeles. To learn about some of the most surprising findings, I talked to lead researcher, Marge Nichols, who's been compiling data on women and girls in Los Angeles County for the past year.

Marge Nichols>> Some of the things that surprised me most, Val, was the surprising difference in the rates of college graduation. We found that about sixty percent of the college graduates last year in Los Angeles County were women and only forty percent were men.

Val Zavala>> These are graduates?

Marge Nichols>> Yes.

Val Zavala>> What's that mean for relationships, work patterns? I mean, that has tremendous implications.

Marge Nichols>> I think it does. It's something that's kind of crept up on us actually down to the point where males are a little bit of an endangered species in higher education. But it has enormous implications about who will be qualified for high-tech work long-term.

Of course, women are not as much in the high-tech fields as men are, so that still remains a little bit of an imbalance. But I think that, long-term, we may see a situation where men are not completing as much education as women and may be more vulnerable to unemployment because of the rising qualifications for work.

Val Zavala>> The report also shows that more women than ever are not just single, but never married. In 1960, sixteen percent of women in Los Angeles County were never married. By 2004, that portion had doubled to thirty-two percent. Any explanation for why that happened?

Marge Nichols>> Sure. People are getting married later, both men and women, but also we have a lot of younger people in our demographic here in Los Angeles that haven't married yet.

Val Zavala>> I see. So they're just not in that marriageable age quite yet. That could change.

Marge Nichols>> That could change, but they will marry later. They almost certainly will marry later. Values and attitudes are changing and people marry much later than they used to.

Val Zavala>> Especially if they're more educated.

Marge Nichols>> That's right.

Val Zavala>> And what about housing? Well, a huge portion of the incomes of single mothers in Los Angeles County goes to pay the rent, forty-two percent. Compare that to what single men pay, thirty-three percent.

Marge Nichols>> With or without children, women are paying much more of their income for rent. I think that has to do with the fact that their incomes are lower. Married couples who have the potential of having two people working, only twenty-four percent of their income is paid for rent.

Val Zavala>> Boy, is that a big difference. Could it also be that, for example, women with children have to rent a bigger place whereas, if you're a single man, you don't have to rent that three-bedroom apartment?

Marge Nichols>> That's right. Single men pay only thirty-three percent of their income for rent, still more than married couples.

Val Zavala>> The high cost of housing also leads to homelessness. The report shows that twenty-four percent of Los Angeles County's homeless population are women and seventeen percent are children. That amounts to thirty-six thousand homeless women and children in Los Angeles County.

Marge Nichols>> The families are not as visible. If fewer families are on Skid Row, although unfortunately there are quite a few families living in the Skid Row area in those very inexpensive hotels, it's a terrible environment for children. So in the homeless count in 2005, they found that thirty-two percent of homeless children are not attending school. This has to have a very bad impact on their education.

Val Zavala>> So what are some of the big changes that you see based on the report?

Marge Nichols>> Well, I think that one of the key things is that more and more employers are going to be demanding higher levels of education. So getting women to complete their high school, complete college, is very critical. Of course, the same applies to men. But the difficulty we've been seeing here is that there's been an increase in low wage work, even the decline in the salaries of people in less skilled work. If you want to maintain a middle class, you have to have people who can take those better jobs.

Val Zavala>> What's one of the solutions based on this? What is one of the key policy solutions?

Marge Nichols>> We believe that one of the key things is to get young people to raise their aspirations, raise their level of knowledge of what it takes to get from here to there, when they're very young. Junior high is a critical period. We all know that, when kids reach junior high, they start branching out in many ways and we need to make sure that that's an entr�e for us to help them understand what they're going to need in the future.

Val Zavala>> So it's kind of a turning point.

Marge Nichols>> Right. Getting a job flipping burgers is not bad when you're in high school, but it's not good when you have a family. So that's what we need to convey to kids, what they need to get work.

Val Zavala>> Marge Nichols, thank you for all your work and your insights. It's a really valuable report.

Marge Nichols>> Thank you.

Val Zavala>> At the website, unitedwayla.org, you can see the entire report or request copies. Again, their website is unitedwayla.org.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> It was started ten years ago by a doctor who wanted to bring Latin American art to southern California, so he started the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and, since then, it's grown by leaps and bounds. Now it's celebrating it's tenth anniversary and I thought that would be the perfect time to get a tour from museum director, Gregorio Luke.

Gregorio Luke>> I really believe that Latin American art is the hottest art in the world today. You find a wealth of different artists, of different artistic movements.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Gregorio, you've been director here at MOLAA for seven years and this is one of your favorite pieces that's here right now?

Gregorio Luke>> It's one of my favorite pieces. It's by an artist from Venezuela called Armando Rever�n. This man is from Venezuela where the light is almost white. This is one of his famous, "Portrait of a Woman". White light is not really white. When you look at the hair, you see all the colors coming together.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> What other one do you like?

Gregorio Luke>> Well, this is an artist that I think is one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century. His name is David Alfaro Siqueiros. Only recently, there have been several of his murals that have been brought to the attention of the public. One, a very famous one on Olvera Street called "America Tropical". There is another museum in Santa Barbara that has another of his murals.

Val Zavala>> That's right.

Gregorio Luke>> And there's a third one they've just discovered. Here you have a beautiful example of Siqueiros --

Val Zavala>> -- what is this painting of?

Gregorio Luke>> It's a volcano. You can see the eruption. But, again, you get a feeling not just of the exterior of that volcano, but of its movement.

[Film Clip]

Gregorio Luke>> This is the work of an artist of the Dominican Republic called Garcia Cordero. The Dominican Republic has been a country that has suffered a lot. They were many years under a ferocious dictatorship. Garcia Cordero captures that drama. To me, a work like this is a good example of how art can not only capture reality objectively, but can also create a reality. This is a wood that exists only in the imagination.

Here you have an artist who incorporates a whole layer of symbols of color, of tonality. If you would ask me what does that mean, I would respond, "Whatever it means to you." That is the wonderful thing about art, that its meaning is not one and the same. It's multiplied by as many viewers that see it.

When you are looking at the work of a master like Manuel Alvarez, Mexico's greatest photographer, you're looking at something that is very familiar and yet you see it as an intimate contact. You also see the technical disparity in the sense that a photographer is as good as the degree of grains that he gives us.

This is an artist called Karim Borjas. His medium is abstraction. He incorporates writing. What I like about it is the idea of how writing can also be a graphic element. It's an image that you can look at for hours and hours and that is another testimony to the diversity and the richness of contemporary Latin American art.

[Film Clip]

Sometimes art magnifies life. In other words, it makes visible what is invisible. For instance, if you're in a race, you see the runner, you see the sweat, but do you really see the effort that expresses those things that we could not talk about, but we can experience and we can feel and we can recognize, and we can recognize ourselves in these scenes?

I want to discuss now two rebels in Mexican art. They are rebels in opposite ways. In Mexico, as you know, the dominant school was that made by Diego Rivero and Rufino Tamayo, the kind of muralists who were very nationalist, very political. And for Tamayo, the essence of Mexico was not the revolutionary struggle, but rather the color of the earth and the simplicity.

The other great rebel is Jose Luis Cuevas. He says that it is about time that Mexicans cross the cactus curse. In other words, he says why is that if we're Latin American, we're supposed to be colorful? This speaks of another Mexico.

This is an artist who was born in Costa Rica, but he did most of his career in Mexico. To me, he's the greatest sculpture of the twentieth century. It is revolutionary. Because for centuries, the standards of beauty have been western, you know, and this is a non-western form of beauty. This is a man that looks at the indigenous women of Latin American and finds them beautiful.

One of the beautiful things of Latin American art is its diversity. You have people that are working in abstractions, others that are working in figurative technique, some that believe in surrealist strategies, others in realistic strategies. Latin American art is the most vibrant, the most powerful, contemporary art in the world today.

Val Zavala>> Well, Gregorio, you are a wonderful spokesperson for Latin American art and it's just been a pleasure spending some time with you.

Gregorio Luke>> My joy.

Val Zavala>> Yes, I know I'm showing my age when I say I've had personal experience with the hula hoop. And, like they say, if you wait long enough, everything comes back around again. Only this time, at a whole new level. Hena Cuevas takes a look at the return of the hula hoop.

Hena Cuevas>> They say what comes around, goes around, and that might be the case of hula hooping.

Rayna McInturf>> "Ladies, let's start by taking some deep inhales, lifting the hoop up above your head, stretching at the top."

Hena Cuevas>> This is Hoopnotica, a combination workout dance class created and taught by Rayna McInturf.

Rayna McInturf>> There are a lot of the same benefits that you would find in, say, Yoga or Pilates, which are both core workouts. You get a lot of core strengthening. Strengthening in all of your abdominal muscles and your lower back. That's your core that supports you.

But this dance goes even beyond that into toning and strengthening your entire body. As you start to work on different parts of the body and involve your limbs, you start to work your entire body from arms, legs, hips, glutes, back, abdominal, feet, wrists, everything. Everything gets a workout.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> She says she first saw this new style of dancing be performed on the street by a woman in Silver Lake. McInturf was hooked.

Rayna McInturf>> I started performing this dance and I would just get approached by people who wanted to know where they could learn how to do that. So I started teaching very shortly into actually hoop dancing myself, so there was always a demand for classes. "So reach your arm up and come down close to the body."

It is quite a workout and the whole point of learning to dance with the hoop is to make it look effortless. So what I've created for students is that I've taken every move and just completely broken it down and that's what we do in class. We take each move and break it down step by step by step.

Hena Cuevas>> But many adults last used a hula hoop when they were just kids and are skeptical about using a childhood toy as a workout tool.

Rayna McInturf>> A lot of people, when we first talked to them about hooping or they see it and we ask them if they want to try, they say, "Oh, I tried that a month ago and I can't do it." We asked them, "Well, have you tried a big adult-sized hoop like this?" "No, I just used my daughter's hoop from school."

That's the biggest reason, I think, for adults, that it kind of has gone out of style because hoops that you can buy in the store are made for children. They're smaller in diameter and they're much lighter in weight. They're really almost impossible for adults to use with any kind of grace. So using an adult-sized hoop, we give this to someone and they give it a try, even though they think they can't, and instantly they're hula hooping and they're amazed.

Hena Cuevas>> Even though Hoopnotica is less than a year old, the classes are sold out and she says there's even a waiting list.

Rayna McInturf>> I know that a lot of women, just like me, hate exercise and really are probably lacking fun in their lives. So this kind of handles both of those things and also has a lot of other benefits like creative self-expression, building of confidence, shifting your mood. Instantly you cannot be upset while hooping.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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