This Cruise Ship

[chris & the giant peach]

Hardly the Titanic is it? As the government attempt to sneak through more cuts that will hit the worse off...disability caring allowance ....under the snooze liner disaster. Has the BBC converted to the Tories now? I know what their headline today should have been. When are this government going to stop finding ways to make the poor poorer?

[everso]

If you're talking about the new sailing ship that will be a flagship for this country, it's being privately funded.

[Patrick]

.....but it wasn't going to be - at first.

Talking of funding, the evilmeister one who plays the Government's hitman in The Lords - Lord Freud - Will be attending a bit of a do at the Demos thinktank lot in March - Here's what they'll be discussing:

"On Thursday 10 March, we launch Of Mutual Benefit, a new Progressive Conservatism Project report on welfare reform.

Confirmed speakers:

Lord Freud, Minister for Welfare Reform
Rt Hon. Frank Field MP
Jack McGarry , CEO of Unum UK
Kitty Ussher, Director of Demos (Chair)

Of Mutual Benefit: Personalised welfare for the many looks at how radical reform to incapacity benefits could provide more generous, secure coverage for individuals whilst saving the taxpayer billions. The report argues for reform to encourage and incentivise greater take-up of private welfare solutions such as personal income protection.

This is a privte, invitation-only roundtable taking place under Chatham House rule in the Wilson Room, Portcullis House, House of Commons, SW1A 0AA. "

I expect next year it will be a thinktank on abolishing Pension Spending.

Apparently - Funding again - Spending on Healthcare, Education and Welfare has been steadily going down through since 2010 and there are estimates that it will carry on "Going Down". At the rate that it's happening - by 2015 - the UK will be spending less on these three as a percentage of GDP than the U.S does.

Looks like everything's about to be Privatised.

[aubrey]

Jack McGarry , CEO of Unum UK

Unum were fined a hell of a lot in the US for fiddling insurance pay-outs: IE, illegally not paying up. (I'll find more stuff about this tomorrow.) IN any case, they are doing a lot here now: discovering a lucrative new market.

[aubrey]

Here is some stuff about Unum:

OFFICIAL WARNING TO ALL COMPANIES


Any company considering employing the services of fraudulent health insurer Unum have been warned about the following. If you decide to employ Unum for health insurance cover then you run the risk of your employees taking legal action against you in the event of Unum unlawfully denying a claim.



- Unum is a disgraced health insurance company recently found guilty of fraud against the US Government.



- Unum has a shocking reputation both in the UK and US for unlawfully rejecting legitimate claims.



- The California Insurance Commissioner describes Unum as an outlaw company.




- Unum have been fined $23 Million due to its claims practices.




- Unum have been forced to re-open 300,000 denied claims at a cost of half a billion dollars.




- Unum have be found to have provided the personal details of Unum customer's to outside companies who have intruded the privacy of their customers by making nuisance telephone calls and accessing vehicles to observe private mail.

- According to the American Association for Justice, Unum are in the top 2 of the worst Insurance Companies for consumers.


Otherwise, just google Unum. There is loads of stuff about them. They have been fined a lot and often for fraudulently denying insurance claims. And the DWP is talking to them about health and unemployment insurance, as the way to go.

Private Eye:

Tricky questions are again being asked about the profits American insurance giant Unum stands to make from its massive media push on income protection cover, promoted as the answer to the latest tough welfare reforms.

Pulling stunts like persuading six bloggers to live for a week on the current average benefit of £95 and then write about it, Jack McGarry, chief executive at Unum UK (pictured), earlier this year warned: “The government’s welfare reform bill will seek to tighten the gateway to benefits for those people unable to work due to sickness or injury. Each year up to 1m people in the UK become disabled and the reforms mean that working people will be able to rely less on state benefits to maintain the standard of living they were used to prior to their illness.”
Well, Unum should know. Behind the scenes it has been helping Tory and Labour governments slash the benefits of disabled and sick people for years – going right back to Peter Lilley’s social security “Incapacity for Work” reforms of 1994. Lilley hired John Le Cascio, then vice-president of Unum, to advise on “claims management”. Le Cascio also sat on the “medical evaluation group”, which – according to Professor Jonathan Rutherford in the academic journal Soundings – was set up to design and enforce more stringent medical tests.

At the same time, the UK wing of Unum was launching what it boasted was “a concerted effort to harness the potential” from predicted cuts in benefits, urging people to protect themselves with a “long-term disability policy from Unum”.

Eye asked first
The Eye first questioned Unum about the possibility of a serious conflict of interest back in 1995. Dr Le Cascio said he didn’t “feel that way” and wouldn’t have taken the government job if he thought there was a conflict. That, of course, was ten years before Unum was found guilty in the US of “systematically violating” insurance regulations and fraudulently denying or “low-balling” claims using phony medical reports, misrepresentation and biased investigations (see Ad Nauseam, last Eye).

Fast-forward 16 years, and plus ça change. Unum’s tarnished reputation has done nothing to diminish its influence here and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is still denying there’s anything amiss about Unum’s more recent meddling. In a lengthy reply last month to Norman Lamb, Nick Clegg’s chief adviser, the DWP neatly skirted questions about whether Unum was advising on welfare reform and about its unlawful activities in the US.

Yet Unum executives sat on both the mental health and physical function “technical working groups” set up under the Labour government in 2006, which reviewed and finally came up with the new, stricter “work compatibility assessments”, introduced for new claimants in 2008. In fact Unum and Atos, the huge French outsourcing company that holds the government’s multimillion contract to conduct the widely criticised assessments on behalf of the DWP (see In the Back, last Eye), were the only for-profit companies represented on the groups. Unum chief executive McGarry has now been appointed to the expert panel reviewing the sickness absence from work system announced by the government in February.

Lobby styles
Prof Rutherford wrote that Unum had also been “building its influence” in a variety of ways over a number of years. He said that in 2001 Le Cascio was a key player at a ground-breaking conference at Woodstock near Oxford, titled “Malingering and Illness Deception”. Malcolm Wicks, Labour work minister at the time, and Mansel Aylward, then chief medical officer at the DWP, were among the 39 delegates.

In the same year, Unum launched a public private partnership to act as a pressure group to extend influence in policymaking. And in 2004 it opened the £1.6m UnumProvident Centre for Psychosocial and Disability Research at Cardiff University. (The centre has since been renamed and Unum says it no longer provides any funding – no doubt because of claims that academic integrity could be called into question by its influence.)

Unum has been lobbying, sitting on expert groups and hosting meetings at party conferences of all colours ever since. And lo and behold, in May this year, Unum’s then medical officer Prof Michael O’Donnell jumped ship to become chief medical officer at Atos. He barely had time to catch his breath before giving evidence to the Commons committee looking at the welfare reform bill.

But Unum is once again denying any conflict of interest “since our current work with the DWP and our marketing campaign are different.” It said its current consultation work is about helping people return to work and its advertising campaign was educational and does not support tightening benefit changes.

Meanwhile disability activists who have fallen foul and been forced to appeal cuts in DWP benefits based on flawed Atos assessments, and campaigning groups like Black Triangle, think the whole thing stinks and are urging MPs to investigate.


US companies apparently have the same status in law as an individual person. But no person would be allowed to carry on working in the same industry after committing systematic fraud on any scale at all, let alone a scale like this.

[Patrick]

Of course, you'll have noticed the rise in Unum adverts as the NHS reform bill heads through Parliament and we're all going to be shuffled off onto "Paid for" Healthcare.

Though better news at the moment is that with a whole host of Medics against him - and only one GP in Doncaster for it - Lansley is looking increasingly weak over this whole debacle.

Talking of debacles, the Welfare Reform Bill goes back to the Commons tomorrow - keep a look out and see if your local MP votes to propel many a disabled person or disabled child into poverty and possibly homelessness.

It'll be the Gas Chambers next for the weak and oddball amongst us. IDS's finger is poised!