Insurer and doctors wage e-combat
By Rob Christensen, Staff Writer
The News and Observer
Published: Jul 24, 2005
It is an unusual marriage: The doctors and the Deaniac. But the docs — with the help of one of former presidential candidate Howard Dean’s computer gurus — have been conducting an aggressive, in-your-face lobbying/ public relations campaign unlike anything seen before in North Carolina.
Call it e-lobbying or e-attack ads.
The executives in the glass corporate headquarters of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina in Chapel Hill must feel as if they are under siege.
Every few days, the docs send out thousands of e-mail messages across the state that try to make North Carolina’s largest insurer look greedy. Some of the messages end up in newsrooms.
One disclosed that Blue Cross had spent $478,000 to entertain at the U.S. Open in Pinehurst last month. Another reported that Blue Cross had spent $600,000 to send executives and sales agents to a meeting on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts last winter.
Blue Cross is not amused. This month the insurer went to court to try to stop the attacks. The company sued the docs’ political committee, saying it had illegally obtained internal documents about Blue Cross’ U.S Open spending — a charge the docs deny.
The tone of the e-wars is that of a street brawl — an effort to be entertaining enough so people will read them. The docs are calling their fight “a death match.” On Thursday the docs sent out e-mail boasting they filed a legal notice to depose Bob Greczyn, the Blue Cross CEO. Taunting Blue Cross, the message asked: “Can you imagine one moment of absolute silence, followed by an enraged howl?”
The ruckus started in 2002 when an informal alliance of physicians, joined by a few pharmacists, hired the two top political guns in North Carolina, Democrat Gary Pearce and Republican Carter Wrenn, former strategists for Jim Hunt and Jesse Helms, respectively.
The docs wanted to stop Blue Cross from converting into a for-profit company, arguing that it would give the company an unwarranted windfall. As Pearce and Wrenn tell it, Blue Cross had the inside game in the General Assembly locked up — hiring the big lobbyists and PR firms and plastering the building with political donations.
So the docs, forming a political committee called ProCare, were forced to conduct an outsider campaign — helping shift public opinion against the big insurance company through advertising and the Internet.
Pearce recruited Matthew Gross, Dean’s campaign Web master, who helped raise $25 million online for the former Vermont governor and has moved to Greensboro. Gross helped reinvent presidential campaign fund raising. Now he is trying to re-imagine lobbying. He created ProCare’s blog and e-lobbying effort.
“It’s like old-fashioned grass-roots politics,” Pearce said, “but instead you are linked together instantaneously.”
Wrenn argues that hiring connected lobbyists is a 20th-century way to influence policy in Raleigh. Hiring political consultants and Web masters is the 21st-century method.
“The trend going on here is old-style lobbying is going to die out over time,” Wrenn said. “All lobbying is going to become public advocacy on issues. The Internet makes it incredibly effective and inexpensive.”
Rob Christensen can be reached at 829-4532 or robc@newsobserver.com.