Reblogged from Beastrabban's Weblog:
This is from the Eye for the 11th – 24th November 2011:
Jack McGarry, Chief Executive at Unum.
Welfare Reform
Mutual Benefits
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 upt 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”.
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 ca 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 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.
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, title “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 £1.5m UnumProvident Centre for Psychosocial and Disability
Research at Cardiff University. (The Centre has since be 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.
So Unum is, like Maximus, another private contractor hired to
implement government welfare policies, a company with a history of
corruption in the US. And like many of the other companies involved in
the government’s welfare reforms, it helps formulate the very same
policies from which it stands to make a profit. Meanwhile, the sick and
disabled are thrown off benefits due to their advice. And, as you’d
expect, they’ve even got a connection of the past masters of cruelty,
fraud and corrupt influence, Atos.