Health Insurers Sue to Keep Records From Public

Federal law requires health care insurers to achieve “parity” between behavioral health benefits and physical health benefits. Of course, this is a farce. Break your leg? Go to the emergency room and have it fixed. Mental breakdown? Good luck.

So, in 2021, Oregon legislators began demanding insurance companies explain themselves. Since then, Oregon Health Authority, which regulates Medicaid providers, and Department of Consumer and Business Services, which regulates commercial ones, have released annual reports summing up what insurers have told them.

OHA’s most recent report runs over 200 pages, and largely found that Medicaid providers were doing an okay job. In contrast, DCBS’s was only 29 pages long and littered with red flags.

Some insurers, it said, have stricter standards for providing behavioral health benefits, which “underscore disparities that continue to affect equitable access to behavioral health services,” it noted. The report, however, named no names.

So, in April, WW asked DCBS to give it the data that insurers had reported. The data includes detailed financial information that would identify the worst culprits. Last week, the agency finally did.

But the dataset, which included only partial data from four insurers, was incomplete—six other insurers had sued in Marion County Circuit Court, asking for a temporary restraining order to stop Willamette Week from obtaining what they call trade secrets. (The insurers suing are Kaiser Permanente, BridgeSpan, Regence BlueCross BlueShield, UnitedHealthCare, Aetna and Cigna.)

The state disagrees that the information is a trade secret, saying the data is public record under state and federal transparency laws. Still, officials are withholding the documents until a judge makes a ruling.