PROVIDENCE – For the first time in nearly six months, ConvergenceRI attended, live and in-person, the news conference held on Wednesday morning, May 29, by R.I. Attorney General Peter Neronha and seven key members of his legal team.

The personal milestone for ConvergenceRI in his ongoing recovery from a series of long-term health challenges took on even greater significance, given the terrible, misleading, skewed news coverage that occurred.

The nearly two-hour event, including questions and answers, had offered up a detailed, in-depth, comprehensive solution to the current health care crisis afflicting Rhode Island.

•      Attorney General Neronha announced his plans to launch an immediate lawsuit against the nation’s three largest Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs – CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRX – charging them with “unfair and deceptive conduct [that] has caused drug prices to skyrocket.”

Much of the local news coverage, however, had put the focus on the lawsuit’s potential impact on CVS, with world headquarters located in Woonsocket.

Yet the local reporters had inexplicably failed to make any connection to OptumRX, the wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare – even as UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare Advantage program had just announced its plans to halt insurance coverage for UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare Advantage patients, beginning on July 1, 2025, for all Brown University Health providers, who would now be deemed to be “out of network.”

Translated, The Providence Journal, The Public’s Radio’s Ian Donnis, WJAR-TV anchor Gene Valicenti, and WPRI-TV political reporter Ted Nesi, among others, had made the UnitedHealthcare’s plans to end its relationship with Brown University Health, the state’s largest health care delivery system and Rhode Island’s largest private employer, “a big **cking deal," but did not make the connection with OptumRX.

[Editor’s Note: The NBC Channel 10 reporter, sitting in front of ConvergenceRI at the news conference, kept refreshing her screen on her laptop to get the latest developments about UnitedHealthcare’s termination of its Medicare Advantage plan benefits beginning July 1, 2025, for those Rhode Islanders insured by Brown University Health.]

•    Attorney General Neronha also introduced legislation to immediately raise Medicaid reimbursement rates to 100 percent of Medicare rates for primary care providers, at a cost estimated to be $50 million, according to the Attorney General.

Translated, for every $1 dollar in Medicaid reimbursements, the state received some $37 in Medicare reimbursements, compared to $200 in Commercial reimbursements, according to a “hypothetical” slide prepared by the Attorney General’s legal team.

Further, the immediate action-oriented part of the plan, included legislative proposals to outlaw the practice of “prior authorization” regulation by health insurers for primary care providers.

Burying the “lede”    
The plan, more than two years in the making, was entitled “A Way Forward,” and it presented “the case for systemic health care reform in Rhode Island.”

What was wrong, then, with most of the reporting about the plan?

•    First, the image presented by GoLocalProv was badly skewed. The photograph chosen to illustrate the story was a heavily cropped image of Attorney General Peter Neronha.

Why had the story excluded any mention of the rest of the seven-member legal team, which had argued the case while Attorney General Neronha quietly listened to their legal brief?  

They were: Lee Staley, Health Care Unit Chief; Keith Hoffman, Assistant Attorney General, Chef of Policy; Sarah Rice, Assistant Attorney General; Stephen Provazza, Assistant Attorney General, Consumer & Economic Justice Unit Chief; Dorothea Lindquist, Special Assistant Attorney General, Health Care Senior Litigation Attorney [who had been featured in the photo chosen by ConvergenceRI]; Julia Harvey, Special Assistant Attorney, General Health Care Advocate; and Jordan Broadbent, Special Assistant Attorney General, Insurance Advocate.

If you were counting, that is four women, three men – all who had been highlighted in a separate media advisory sent out the day before the news conference.

In stark contrast to GoLocalProv’s choice to exclude the AG’s legal team from the photograph, political reporter Ian Donnis of The Public’s Radio had also chosen to include a photo of some of the special guests that Attorney General had invited to attend the news conference, featuring health reform advocate State Sen. Linda Ujifusa; Lynn Blais, RN, president of the local United Nurses & Allied Professionals; and Patrick Crowley, president of the RI AFL-CIO.

Further, in the last paragraph of his story, Donnis chose to highlight Attorney General Neronha thanking House Speaker Joe Shekarchi and the late Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, for supporting the funding to double the size of the health care legal team.

During the question-and-answer segment of the news conference, Lynn Blais stood up and spoke out, congratulating Attorney General Neronha on the boldness of his health plan.

And state Sen. Linda Ujifusa told ConvergenceRI, following the news conference: “I was so excited to hear R.I. Attorney General Peter Neronha plan for Rhode Island to address its broken health care system,” she said. “He’s suing PBMs to reduce prescription drug prices and save independent pharmacies; he’s pushing legislation to reduce administrative burdens on physicians [including prior authorization], and his reform options, including single payer,” Ujifusa continued. “These are all policies I and State House colleagues have been supporting for years. I am so thankful for all the hard work he and his staff have undertaken.”

What got left out of most of the reporting – or buried deep within the stories  -- was the health policy reforms focused on single-payer and public-policy financing, data collection and analysis built into the collaborative work product being pursued by the Attorney General’s legal team and the Brown University School of Public Health’s Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research [CAHPR], as well as policy options for state-based health system reform.

And, if that was not a “mouthful,” the plan calls for a new state health care agency to obtain and to analyze health-care data and effective governmental decision-making.

Let that sink in for a moment: a state single payer plan and a public-payer financing system.

As one astute health care advocate wrote to ConvergenceRI after reading through the plan’s website, “All good stuff. Won’t save us but won’t hurt. Medicaid increase is a great idea but should be combined with a price cap at a percentage of Medicare for commercial prices. That’s what CAHPR will likely recommend.”

Another observer wrote to ConvergenceRI: “EOHHSS and McKee have repeatedly shirked and neglected their duties. Neronha has taken on the role of consumer advocate in a failed health care market. These Band Aid solutions are a start, but lack a cohesive vision – the insurance company hydra will always grow to capitalize in the place you’re  not looking and least expect. (i.e., PBMs behave the way they do because no one ever made it illegal to do that.)

As ConvergenceRI walked out of the news conference, he stopped to ask Attorney General Neronha a question: How can the voices of caregivers and patients be mobilized to be heard and amplified to be in favor of  “A way forward?”

The question was apt, given the fact that very Wednesday evening, The Boston Globe, as part of its regular series, “A Rhode Map,” was hosting a public forum on the health care crisis in Rhode Island, featuring Attorney General Neronha and the CEOs of Care New England, Brown University Health, and Johnson & Wales.

Indeed, where would the caregivers and the patients get to tell their stories, instead of having to listen to the “wisdom” of CEOs and reporters, who kept “burying the lede” when it comes to reporting on health care?