Patient Narratives: A Correction

I owe journalist Carrie Ghose an apology.

Last year, I used her story on one woman's health insurance woes to illustrate how difficult it can be to get patient narratives right.

Ghose, who reports for the Columbus (Oh.) Business First publication, had written that her subject, an insurance agent, had decided that her family should go without health insurance for six months to qualify for Ohio's high-risk insurance pool. Here's how Ghose started her article:

Sheila Hokes thought she'd found a lifeline to keep her family from drowning in health insurance costs.

The Delaware County resident understood when a surgery for her son's lifelong digestive condition caused her premiums to shoot up by $700 a month in March. Then came a $400 increase July 1, bringing the total to $2,600 – or more than $31,000 a year for the family of four.

But Ghose and her story were called out by InsureBlog's Henry Stern, who wrote that the woman, as an insurance agent, should have known that carriers can't raise premiums for individual insured patients. He implied that Ghose might have been misled by the agent, who headed the political action committee of a health insurance agents' group.

I had been reading the group-written InsureBlog for years and viewed it as a credible source of information and story ideas about health insurance and health reform, so I didn't think to challenge Stern's analysis. I should have.

As it turns out, Stern was wrong about Ghose's reporting, and so was I. Ghose had gotten her subject's story correct. In fact, there is nothing in Ohio law that prevents insurers from raising a family's premiums after an expensive surgery or other costly claim. 

Stern wrote a correction shortly after Ghose contacted him and after I used his original column as a source for my blog post. I found out about Stern's correction only after Ghose wrote a comment on my critical post almost a year after it was published.

When I saw Ghose's comment, I gulped and then called her to get the details of what happened.  

"It wasn't a pleasant experience," Ghose told me, noting that my post and Stern's were at the top of search results for her name. When she saw Stern's blog post, she wondered: "Did I make a mistake, is this practice illegal? It didn't sit right with me."

Ghose went back and checked her facts. She searched the Ohio legal code and found nothing that prevented insurers from raising premiums, and confirmed her work with other experts. As for whether she should have noted her subject's political action work, Ghose said the agent wasn't advocating for high-risk insurance pools, but another issue unrelated to the topic of her story.

"It was a case where the real person example was extraordinary and was true," Ghose said. The agent told Ghose she knew she was taking a risk and would not advise her clients to do what she did.

Ghose pointed that out in the story. "She if anyone knew how the system worked," Ghose said.

So, I'm sorry, Carrie. I just wish it hadn't taken a year to set things right.

One saving grace: Ghose agreed with my tips for getting patient narratives right, which you can read here.

Photo credit: Patrick Kitely via Flickr