It looks like Steve
Trossman (SEIU-UHW’s Communications Director) and Chris Rauber (a reporter at the San Francisco Business Times) have egg on their faces… again! Readers
might remember Rauber from an earlier episode, when he published an article -- peddled
by Trossman -- that got the
facts all wrong on SEIU-UHW’s contract with Tenet Healthcare.
Apparently, Rauber is SEIU-UHW’s favorite go-to journalist
because he simply re-prints SEIU’s press releases as full-blown articles without
doing any fact-checking. (Talk about lazy journalism!)
How did Rauber accomplish his latest faceplant? This summer,
NUHW and the Courage Campaign (an advocacy organization) asked California’s
governor to investigate double-digit insurance rate hikes that Kaiser Permanente imposed on more than
300,000 California consumers. In letters
to the governor, the two organizations pointed out that Kaiser failed to justify
its rate hikes, as required by California
law.
After the San
Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the complaints, Rauber
printed his own SEIU-inspired
article trashing the San Francisco Chronicle and its reporter. Rauber
simply dismissed the complaint against Kaiser as “a bargaining ploy” and called
the Chronicle’s article “odd.” (Hmmm, Tasty wonders why it’s "odd" for a newspaper to
write about giant companies ripping off the public…)
Well, here’s the latest news. Government officials just
finished their investigation and… guess what? NUHW and the Courage Campaign
were right! Kaiser was over-charging California consumers by as much as $30
million. And Kaiser, which is swimming in $5.7 billion in profits, has agreed
to partially roll
back its rate hikes on the 300,000 consumers.
So what is SEIU’s "dynamic duo of disinformation" saying about these latest developments? As far as Tasty can tell, there’s not a peep from Trossman and Rauber.
Must be busy cleaning all that egg off their faces.
