Miranda Devine: Corby vs. Hicks

Grace under fire moves a nation

By Miranda Devine
May 29, 2005
The Sun-Herald

Composed: Corby, flanked by police officers, as she left court on Friday
Photo: AFP

After visiting Schapelle Corby in prison after her conviction, her defence team met beside the pool at the rented Seminyak villa of her financial backer, Gold Coast businessman Ron Bakir.

They ordered pizza and wept, as Bakir, 28, played Corby's song on the stereo - a homemade mix of Michael Buble's song Home and poignant snatches of Corby's voice in the courtroom.

"It's not fair," said red-eyed Bakir of her 20-year sentence, as news came that the prosecutor was appealing its "leniency".

Lebanese-born Bakir, a high school dropout made good from Merrylands, western Sydney, and his friend, Gold Coast lawyer Robin Tampoe, 38, are chivalrous men a little in love with the damsel in distress sitting in Kerobokan prison a few kilometres away. Bakir, a former bankrupt, has been portrayed as an opportunistic spiv, but the reality may be quite different, as his genuine anguish after the verdict indicates.

Tampoe, whose dark good looks come from his Irish-Sri Lankan background, is another poor boy made good, specialising in commercial law for Japanese and Korean businesses. With the oft-criticised young Indonesian lawyer Lily Lubis, they are characters straight from central casting in Corby's David v Goliath struggle to prove her innocence.

"They are just a poor family," said Tampoe of the Corbys, "a normal family. Those type of people normally don't fight, do they? Everyone thought they wouldn't fight and they all dismissed us. But they underestimated her."

Schapelle's Princess Diana-like popularity in Australia is seemingly unstoppable. It sneaked up on politicians and much of the media and has caused a world of trouble between Australia and Indonesia. It has brought out the worst xenophobia in her fellow citizens, complete with bomb threats to Indonesian consulates, and one radio host describing the three judges as monkeys, "straight out of the trees".

It has forced Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers into damage control, trying to offload blame on to her defence team as public anger grows at the realisation the Government, the Federal Police and Qantas did little to help her case.

What was remarkable in that muggy chaotic Denpasar court room on Friday was Schapelle's composure as she was convicted of trafficking 4.1 kilograms of marijuana into Bali. Through the chaos of 40 flashing cameras poked through the open windows, 200 journalists, family and friends, packed thigh to sweaty thigh behind her, rows of armed Indonesian police lining the walls, the sound of crashing tripods outside, swearing cameramen, reporters filing live crosses and a dozen translators murmuring, she stayed calm and straight-backed for almost two hours.

It was only as the third judge began to read his portion of the verdict in a harsh hectoring tone that the 27-year-old Gold Coast student beautician began to rock and weep. But she always pulled herself together and turned to smile and mouth "It's OK" to her family, sitting gloomy and uncomprehending in the front row.

She seemed only to despair when her sister Mercedes and mother Ros began shrieking at the judges after they pronounced the 20-year sentence.

"You people, how dare you," yelled Ros. "You judges will never sleep."

"Mum, stay calm. Mum, stop, it's OK. Just relax," pleaded Corby as the police rushed to surround the family, and Corby's usually placid father Michael crossly shushed his ex-wife.

"Schapelle's asked you," he said.

"I know what I'm doing," Ros snapped back.

The family dynamics bolstered an impression of Corby which has emerged throughout her seven-month ordeal, that she is the dutiful third daughter of a poor, loyal but relatively dysfunctional family; adored by her terminally ill father, who left the family when she was six; who has tried to make something of herself by being perfect.

Her grooming every day of the trial has been immaculate, a Herculean task in her circumstances, with just bowls of water to wash in.

The Australian public has seen what Corby's defence team saw long ago: a transcendent grace that makes her guilt implausible. Her strength of character, not to mention the careful styling and stunning good looks, improved in recent months by jail-time weight loss, have bolstered her claim she is innocent and that corrupt baggage handlers planted the drugs in her boogie board bag.

Public belief in her innocence is evident on the baggage carousel at Bali's Denpasar airport. Almost all the bags are locked, or bound with straps, some even shrink-wrapped in plastic.

A new paranoia has joined the Australian travellers' worries, along with Islamic terrorists and windshear. If, as Corby claims, someone put the plastic sack of hydroponic marijuana in her bag between Brisbane airport and Bali, then any one of us could be sitting in her dank cell in the Kerobokan prison tonight.

Protection, not money, the key to securing exclusive access

Contrary to popular belief, Channel Nine did not pay Schapelle Corby's mother Ros a cent.

Australian journalists covering the story in Bali have been complaining about chequebooks all week because Nine had gained exclusive access to Ros, Schapelle's father Michael and other family members.

In fact, Nine paid for air fares and a villa in Bali for Ros and her partner Greg. "She chose a really modest villa," producer Sean Walsh said. "She never hits us up for extra money for food. She's never been greedy. She's just really decent."

What the public may not understand is that in media-saturated situations, families like the Corbys will often choose to give exclusive access to one outlet, not for money, but in order to gain protection from the rest of the media, which is competing fiercely for their attention.

The chosen media organisation will then shield the family from media scrums, organise getaway cars, courtroom seats, translators, secure accommodation and such mundane items as bottles of water and cigarettes.

It is, of course, infuriating for other journalists to be blocked from getting the story but that doesn't mean the family is venal

What I tried to say was

In an email from Java, Professor Tim Lindsey, director of the University of Melbourne's Asian Law Centre, took exception to last week's column which quoted him defending the Indonesian criminal justice system. He wants to make clear he never said the Indonesian justice system is not corrupt.

However, he says: "I have not seen anything to suggest that this court is acting corruptly in Corby's trial.

"What I have said on repeated occasions is that the Indonesian system has serious problems of institutionalised corruption at all levels but this certainly does not mean all judicial decisions in Indonesia are corrupt.

"Many major commercial cases are often subject to corruption, as are many political cases. Routine criminal cases are, however, less likely to be exposed to this problem.

"The current Chief Justice of Indonesia, Professor Bagir Manan, is a committed reformer and under his leadership there have been major steps towards cleaning up the courts."

Professor Lindsey is none too popular with Corby's defence team, after he said they "did not rise well to the challenge" of countering the prosecution case. He also slammed Indonesian lead lawyer Lily Lubis for crying in court and being "young and relatively inexperienced".

But the competent Lubis had hired a more experienced, albeit less photogenic, well-connected lawyer to run the case in court. Erwin Siregar, a lawyer in Denpasar for 26 years, has defended more than 100 drugs cases and among those people who bombarded his mobile phone with messages of support after the verdict was good friend Denny Kailimang, Jakarta-based head of the Indonesian Lawyers Association.

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'Guilty' puts end to the Hicks myth

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March 29, 2007

Other related coverage

• Guilty plea to get out: Hicks dad
• Hicks 'pressured' into plea

By pleading guilty to terrorism this week, David Hicks has plastered egg all over the faces of his supporters - the naive hysterics who believe he is a tortured innocent as well as those glory-seeking civil rights lawyers who have attached themselves to his case.

The egg was coming, anyway, as the prosecution finally had an opportunity to lay out its allegations before the United States military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But even as they wiped the yolk from their surprised brows yesterday, apologists for the 31-year-old Muslim convert, aka Mohammed Dawood, had found another way to spin this piece of bad news to their advantage.

"There's no way that this can be seen as a genuine guilty plea," the Greens senator Bob Brown told reporters, ignoring the fact that an innocent man would do anything to have his day in court.

"[It is] simply a plea for release for exit from the inhumane Guantanamo Bay gulag."

Singing from the same songsheet were newspaper letter pages bulging with outrage: "By accepting a plea deal to escape the Guantanamo Bay hellhole, a bit player who hurt nobody becomes a self-confessed war criminal," wrote Lesley Pople of Cremorne.

Thus you see the spin: Hicks only pleaded guilty to get out of the gulag, not because he is guilty. And even if he is a teensy bit guilty he's not a big scary terrorist, like Osama bin Laden. He's just a bit player. A small fish. Which is what most terrorists are. You don't find big fish like bin Laden or Khalid Sheik Mohammed strapping on backpacks full of hydrogen peroxide.

But with Hicks pleading guilty to the charge of providing material support to a terrorist organisation, we can only hope for some respite from the mythology that has grown around him.

No more "Free David Hicks" posters in cafes across the "intellectual" suburbs. Getup! might stop running ads portraying the self-confessed terrorist with the receding hairline as a cherubic nine-year-old. It might even think about returning the $500,000 it received last year in public donations, much of which it spent on salaries and expenses, as Australian Securities and Investments Commission documents reportedly revealed last month.

Maybe now Hicks's supporters might stop referring to him as "gaunt" since courtroom artists in the prison camp have revealed how porky he has grown on meals consumed on the US taxpayer.

Maybe now his lawyers might even drop the pretence that Hicks's hair is long because he needs to wrap it around his eyes to block out an "inhumane" light in his cell 24 hours a day, even though US authorities keep saying the "security light" is so dimmed at night you can't read a book by it.

Maybe now, we can put the American system for dealing with terrorist detainees in perspective, instead of falling for the line that it is the moral equivalent of al-Qaeda.

One such line came from Steven Miles, an America bioethicist who appeared on ABC's Lateline this week complaining about conditions at Guantanamo Bay. One of the techniques was to put "nude pin-ups on the chests of prisoners, having them take them off and then match them up with pin-ups on the floor". Another interrogation tactic was to make the detainees watch movies such as Die Terrorists, Die.

Responding on the program to the allegation that interrogation is designed to manipulate detainees' emotions and weakness, the US chief prosecutor, Moe Davis, said: "I would certainly hope so. I mean, that's the purpose of an interrogation is to obtain intelligence information to prevent the next 9/11 or the next Bali bombing."

Maybe now that he has confessed to being a terrorist people might start remembering the real David Hicks.

Here are the inconvenient facts:

On October 5, 2001, the Australian Government announced it was committing troops to the war against terrorism. By this stage, according to the charge sheet prepared by US prosecutors, Hicks had been at Kandahar airport for about two weeks with other al-Qaeda fighters. He had been issued with an AK-47 rifle and then "on his own armed himself with six ammunition magazines, 300 rounds of ammunition, and three grenades to use in fighting against the US Northern Alliance or other coalition forces".

It was a full two months before Hicks would be captured in Afghanistan.

On October 22, 2001, the first deployment of our Special Forces Task Group left Australia for Afghanistan.

This was about the time Hicks "decided to look for another opportunity to fight in Kabul", where he had heard fighting would be heavy.

On or about November 9, 2001, Hicks met a terrorist friend "who requested Hicks go to the front lines in Konduz [in the north] with him". Hicks joined a group of fighters including the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who were "engaged in combat against coalition forces".

After the front line collapsed, Hicks spent the rest of November in Arab safe houses in Konduz, still with his AK-47. By late November, there were reports that an advance party of Special Air Service soldiers was in Afghanistan. On December 3, 2001, Australian SAS troops were confirmed to be in Kandahar. That was about the time Hicks was arrested, in a taxi heading from Konduz to the Pakistan border.

It's worth remembering that on February 17, 2002, an Australian SAS soldier, Sergeant Andrew Russell, was killed in Afghanistan after an anti-tank mine exploded. While his death occurred two months after Hicks's capture, it nevertheless highlights Australia's very real exposure on the front line.

Hicks was not a misguided child who only went back to Afghanistan to retrieve his clothes, as some of his supporters maintain.

He was a well-trained terrorist, an al-Qaeda "golden boy" who had watched footage of the September 11, 2001, attacks which killed 3000 innocent people, including Australians, on a friend's TV in Pakistan, who "approved of the attacks" and went back to Afghanistan to fight the US and its allies with his terrorist mates. He was the enemy traitor when Australian troops were on the ground.

Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers

Anne Sherwood for The New York Times

Jacqueline Wheeler with her mother Mary Derks, who bought a long-term-care policy from Conseco, which denied coverage.

By CHARLES DUHIGG

Published: March 26, 2007

CONRAD, Mont. — Mary Rose Derks was a 65-year-old widow in 1990, when she began preparing for the day she could no longer care for herself. Every month, out of her grocery fund, she scrimped together about $100 for an insurance policy that promised to pay eventually for a room in an assisted living home.

On a May afternoon in 2002, after bouts of hypertension and diabetes had hospitalized her dozens of times, Mrs. Derks reluctantly agreed that it was time. She shed a few tears, watched her family pack her favorite blankets and rode to Beehive Homes, five blocks from her daughter’s farm equipment dealership.

At least, Mrs. Derks said at the time, she would not be a financial burden on her family.

But when she filed a claim with her insurer, Conseco, it said she had waited too long. Then it said Beehive Homes was not an approved facility, despite its state license. Eventually, Conseco argued that Mrs. Derks was not sufficiently infirm, despite her early-stage dementia and the 37 pills she takes each day.

After more than four years, Mrs. Derks, now 81, has yet to receive a penny from Conseco, while her family has paid about $70,000. Her daughter has sent Conseco dozens of bulky envelopes and spent hours on the phone. Each time the answer is the same: Denied.

Tens of thousands of elderly Americans have received life-prolonging care as a result of their long-term-care policies. With more than eight million customers, such insurance is one of the many products that companies are pitching to older Americans reaching retirement.

Yet thousands of policyholders say they have received only excuses about why insurers will not pay. Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult — if not impossible — for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.

“The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims,” said Mary Beth Senkewicz, who resigned last year as a senior executive at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. “They’ll do anything to avoid paying, because if they wait long enough, they know the policyholders will die.”

In 2003, a subsidiary of Conseco, Bankers Life and Casualty, sent an 85-year-old woman suffering from dementia the wrong form to fill out, according to a lawsuit, then denied her claim because of improper paperwork. Last year, according to another pending suit, the insurer Penn Treaty American decided that a 92-year-old man had so improved that he should leave his nursing home despite his forgetfulness, anxiety and doctor’s orders to seek continued care. Another suit contended that a company owned by the John Hancock Insurance Company had tried to rescind the coverage of a 72-year-old man when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease four years after buying the policy.

In court filings, all three companies said the denials had been proper. They declined further comment on the cases, though Bankers Life and John Hancock eventually settled for unspecified amounts.

In general, insurers say criticisms of claims-handling are unfair because most policyholders are paid promptly and some denials are necessary to root out fraud.

In a statement, Conseco said the company “is committed to the highest standards for ethics, fairness and accountability, and strives to pay all claims in accordance with policy contracts.” Penn Treaty said in a statement, “We strive to treat all policyholders fairly, and to deliver the best, most efficient evaluation of their claim as possible.”

But policyholders have lodged thousands of complaints against the major long-term-care insurers. A disproportionate number have focused on Conseco, its affiliate, Bankers Life, and Penn Treaty. In 2005, Conseco received more than one complaint regarding long-term-care insurance for every 383 such policyholders, according to data from the insurance commissioners’ association. Penn Treaty received one complaint for every 1,207 long-term-care policyholders. (The complaints touch on a variety of topics, including claims handling, price increases and advertising methods.)

By comparison, Genworth Financial, the largest long-term-care insurer, received only one complaint for every 12,434 policies.

Conseco is among the nation’s largest insurers, collecting premiums worth more than $4.2 billion in 2006, of which long-term-care policies contributed 21 percent. Penn Treaty focuses primarily on long-term-care products and collected premiums of about $320 million in 2004, the last year the company filed an audited annual report.

In depositions and interviews, current and former employees at Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty described business practices that denied or delayed policyholders’ claims for seemingly trivial reasons. Employees said they had been prohibited from making phone calls to policyholders and that claims had been abandoned without informing policyholders. Such tactics, advocates for the elderly say, are becoming common throughout the industry.

“These companies have essentially turned their bureaucracies into profit centers,” said Glenn R. Kantor, a California lawyer who has represented policyholders.

Yet these concerns have been ignored by state regulators, advocates say, and have gone unnoticed by federal lawmakers who recently passed incentives intended to promote purchases of long-term-care policies, in the hopes of forestalling a Medicare funding crisis.

Conseco and Bankers Life “made it so hard to make a claim that people either died or gave up,” said Betty J. Hobel, a former Bankers Life agent in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“When someone is 70 or 80 years old,” she said, “how many times are they going to try before they just give up?”

A Race to Sell Policies

When Mrs. Derks bought her long-term-care policy from a door-to-door salesman in 1990, she was unaware that she represented the insurance industry’s newest gold mine.

Her husband had died eight years earlier of a stroke, leaving her to run a barley farm in northern Montana, where she lived with her three children and her aging mother. As she watched her own parent decline, Mrs. Derks became preoccupied with sparing her children the expense of her final years.

“She was terrified that she would bankrupt us or get sent to a public nursing home,” said Ken E. Wheeler, her son-in-law.

At the time, long-term-care policies, which can cover the costs of assisted-living facilities, nursing homes and at-home care, were becoming one of the insurance industry’s fastest-growing products. Companies like Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty were aggressively signing up clients who were not in the best health at rates far below their competitors’ in order to win more business, former agents said. From 1991 to 1999, long-term-care sales helped drive total revenue gains of roughly 500 percent each at Penn Treaty and Conseco, including its affiliate Bankers Life.

Cracks in the business, however, soon started to appear. Insurance executives began warning they had underestimated how long policyholders would live after entering nursing homes. The costs of treating Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes ballooned.

As insurers began realizing their miscalculations, they persuaded insurance commissioners in California, Pennsylvania, Florida and other states to approve price increases of as much as 40 percent a year.

By 2002, Conseco’s long-term-care payouts exceeded revenue. Those and other disappointing results prompted the company to file for bankruptcy, from which it emerged 10 months later.

That same year, Mrs. Derks entered Beehive Homes, a cheery, 12-bed center one block from the Prairie View elementary school. In the previous four years, she had been hospitalized more than two dozen times. She had once lain unconscious in her living room for a day and a half. Her physician ordered her into an assisted-living center.

Initially, Conseco told Mrs. Derks’s daughter, Jackie Wheeler, that her claim would go through smoothly, Mrs. Wheeler said. The family began paying Beehive Homes’s $1,900 monthly fee.

But three months after submitting her claim, Mrs. Derks received a letter from Conseco saying she had waited too long, and her earliest costs would not be reimbursed. Two months later, she received another letter denying her entire claim because she had not submitted proof of illness.

Yet a copy of Mrs. Derks’s policy, sent to the Wheelers by Conseco in 2004 and reviewed by The Times, mentions no requirement for proof of illness. The policy requires only that the confinement be ordered by a physician, and it allows for a notice of claim to be sent “as soon as reasonably possible.”

Mrs. Derks’s daughter called Conseco and explained that her mother could not recall the date or people’s names and had started multiple fires by forgetting to turn off the stove. She sent letters stating that her mother needed assistance to dress, eat, go to the bathroom and inject insulin.

“This is medically necessary!!!” reads a form signed by Mrs. Derks’s physician in 2004. “This has been filled out three times! This person needs assistance!”

Seven months later, Conseco sent another letter, this time denying Mrs. Derks’s claim because her policy “requires a staffed registered nurse 24 hours per day.” Her policy does not mention such a requirement.

Conseco also sent letters denying Mrs. Derks’s claim because her policy had an “assisted living facility rider,” and because Mrs. Derks “does not have an assisted living facility rider.” In all, the family received more than a dozen letters from the company. Many contradict one another, and frequently cite requirements that are nowhere mentioned in Mrs. Derks’s policy.

“There was always a new step in the runaround,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “It felt like everything was designed to make me just go away.”

Over two years, Mrs. Wheeler estimated, she called the company about 100 times. Twice a month, she sent envelopes stuffed with medical records. Some afternoons, she spent hours making calls. After one conversation, Mrs. Wheeler slammed down the phone and started to cry. Then she drove to Beehive Homes, where her mother was surrounded by faded photos of her childhood and boxes of adult diapers.

“I wouldn’t tell her about the problems we were having with Conseco, because I knew it would cause her so much worry,” Mrs. Wheeler said.

Eventually, the Wheelers sold part of their John Deere dealership to raise money to pay for her mother’s care. In October 2006, they sued.

Conseco, asked by a reporter about the company’s handling of the Derks claim, declined to answer, citing the pending litigation. In court documents, the company denied Mrs. Derks’s allegations without specifying why her claim was denied.

“We did everything they asked,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “And this company just treats us like dirt.”

Tales of Bureaucracy

Inside the large Conseco headquarters in Carmel, Ind., scores of employees receive the flood of documents and calls that arrive each day. At times, according to depositions and interviews, that deluge became so overwhelming that documents were lost, calls went unreturned and mistakes occurred.

Some employees describe vast mailrooms where documents appear and disappear. One call-center representative said he was afforded an average of only four minutes to handle each policyholder’s call, no matter how complicated the questions. Employees said they were instructed not to say when the company was behind in processing paperwork, even when the backlog extended to 45 days. Workers were prohibited from contacting each other by phone, although such calls might have quickly resolved obstacles, according to depositions.

Conseco, asked in detail about the company’s policies, declined to respond.

Bureaucratic obstacles were pervasive, according to interviews with 10 former Conseco employees and depositions of more than a dozen others. Robert W. Ragle, a former Bankers Life branch manager, once contacted the claims department on behalf of a client, and “they just laughed us off the phone,” he said. “Their mentality is to keep every dollar they can.” Mr. Ragle was dismissed by Bankers Life in 2002. He sued for wrongful termination and settled out of court.

In lawsuits, complaints and interviews, policyholders contend that Conseco, Bankers Life or Penn Treaty denied claims because policyholders failed to submit unimportant paperwork; because daily nursing notes did not detail minute procedures; because policyholders filled out the wrong forms after receiving them from the insurance companies; and because facilities were deemed inappropriate even though they were licensed by state regulators.

In depositions conducted on behalf of angry policyholders, Conseco employees described bureaucratic obstacles that prevented payment of claims. Those depositions were sealed in settlement agreements but were obtained by The Times.

In a 2006 deposition, a Bankers Life and Conseco claims adjuster, Teresa Carbonel, testified that she denied claims because of missing records but was prohibited from calling nursing homes or physicians to request the documents. She also testified that when a claim was denied, she was forbidden to phone a policyholder, but instead used a time-consuming mailing system.

Ms. Carbonel’s testimony, recorded during lawsuit on behalf of a 94-year-old policyholder, Rhodes K. Scherer, also disclosed that if policyholders did not mail requested documents within 21 days, Conseco might abandon their claim, sometimes without informing them.

In the case of Mr. Scherer, who was institutionalized after a bathroom fall, it was difficult to obtain a response, Ms. Carbonel said, because the company’s requests were mailed to his home address, rather than the nursing center where the company had been notified that he had moved. Ms. Carbonel, who is no longer with the company, did not return calls. Conseco declined to comment on her testimony.

In another deposition, Conseco’s then-senior manager for long-term- care claims, Jose S. Torres, testified that Conseco would sometimes withhold payments until it received documents not required by customers’ policies. In Mr. Scherer’s case, Mr. Torres said, the company refused to pay his nursing home costs unless he sent copies of the home’s license, payment invoices and medical records, even though those documents had no bearing on approving his claim.

Mr. Scherer’s claim “was handled not in the best way, but it was handled according to the processes and procedures placed at the time,” Mr. Torres testified. “Mistakes are going to be made, you know.”

Other executives testified that when Conseco appeared to have lost important documents in Mr. Scherer’s claim, no investigation was initiated. Shawn Michael Schechter, a Conseco claims supervisor who left the company in 2005 on positive terms, according to the deposition, testified that the handling of Mr. Scherer’s claim violated the principle of good faith, which requires insurance companies to treat customers fairly.

“The claim adjuster could have made that very easy and not have put the burden back onto the policyholder,” he testified.

Mr. Torres did not return calls. Mr. Schechter declined to answer questions.

Mr. Scherer died in 2004 without receiving benefits from Conseco. His estate settled with the company in February for an undisclosed amount, according to a lawyer representing the estate.

Conseco declined to discuss its complaint history or individual cases, citing confidentiality agreements. In its statement, the company said that in 2006, Conseco paid nearly $2.3 billion on 9.8 million claims in all types of insurance sold by the company.

The company added: “Conseco, through training, education and process improvements in all of its insurance companies, is continuously focused on enhancing service and resolving any problems expeditiously. The Conseco Insurance Group’s overall insurance department complaints decreased 20 percent from 2005 to 2006.”

Depositions of executives at Penn Treaty also point to questionable practices. In a 2005 lawsuit, a Penn Treaty senior vice president, Stephen Robert LaPierre, testified that the company rejected one claim without informing the policyholder why, asked for information that was not required to process a claim, gave incomplete information about a claim’s status and said the company was delaying payment because of an investigation while failing to take steps that might have resolved the inquiry.

Mr. LaPierre declined to discuss his testimony. Penn Treaty settled the lawsuit by paying the policyholder an unspecified amount, the policyholder’s lawyer said.

Penn Treaty said in a statement that evaluating a company by measuring its complaints was flawed, and that since 2003, the company has denied an average of less than 1.7 percent of the up to 8,000 claims it received every year because of reasons related to policyholder eligibility. “From time to time, Penn Treaty is compelled to investigate fraud or questionable billing activities,” the company added.

Few Regulatory Inquiries

Few of the cases or complaints filed against Conseco, Bankers Life, Penn Treaty or other insurers have received much attention, in part because many lawsuits filed against long-term-care insurers have been settled with the requirement that depositions, documents and settlement terms be kept confidential. Frequently, say policyholders’ lawyers, the companies have been willing to pay millions of dollars in exchange for confidentiality.

Furthermore, despite the complaints against long-term-care insurers, few states have conducted meaningful investigations.

Ron Gallagher, a deputy commissioner with the Pennsylvania Insurance Department, said, “I don’t know that we have a real problem with improper claim denials.”

Yet data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners show that from 2003 to 2005, Pennsylvania received more complaints regarding Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty than any other state. Mr. Gallagher said he might begin a new review of those companies.

Other states with large numbers of long-term-care complaints, including California, Missouri, Maryland, Indiana and Washington have not begun investigations, or have reviewed only small numbers of policies.

As a result, other seniors may end up like Mrs. Derks.

While she was waiting for her lawsuit to proceed, Medicaid began contributing to Ms. Derks’s care. Taxpayers now pay Beehive Homes about $32 daily for her care.

“Long-term-care insurance is supposed to result in less pressure on Medicaid, not more,” said Ms. Senkewicz, the former executive at the insurance commissioners’ association.

For Mrs. Derks’s family, things have already broken down.

“How many other people are out there who don’t have a family to fight for them and have just given up?” asked Jackie Wheeler. “This company should be ashamed.”

Bob Morris- wanker

The Age Of Dissonance

The Little Puritans

By BOB MORRIS

Published: March 11, 2007

Not long ago, after a nice outdoor dinner on Jamaica, my brother and I ordered drinks and lighted cigarettes. My delightful nephew, who is 12, became miserable. “You really have to put those out,” he told us. “You could die.”

After a few nights of his saying the same thing, it became a bore, especially when he held his napkin to his face like a gas mask for secondhand smoke.

I explained firmly that his father and I are social smokers, who like the occasional cigarette, and that secondhand smoke isn’t an issue outdoors on the water. He went off to sulk. I felt bad.

But later, my brother, a caring father, said he was grateful I had spoken up.

“He won’t accept that the occasional cigarette isn’t going to kill you,” he said. “He’s been brainwashed by all his school programs, and it’s become oppressive.”

I know other parents who say the same. Their younger children are having nightmares from graphic antismoking films they see in school or thinking that their relatives with bad habits are bad people.

One nonsmoking father, Robert Warren, who records albums for children as Uncle Rock, wrote a controversial song he never recorded called “I Love Someone Who Smokes.” His gentle son, in first grade at the time, was grappling with how to reconcile frightening information he was getting in school with his feelings for a beloved grandmother with a nicotine habit.

Still, it would be irresponsible not to applaud the good intentions of substance-abuse programs. And it would be wrong not to note that smoking is linked to 450,000 deaths a year, and that for most people my moderate social smoking is not an option, given the addictive quality of nicotine.

“We’re telling kids in schools all over the country that smoking is addictive and causes cancer and heart disease,” said Joseph Califano, the president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia. “And there’s no way that they’re not going to bring that message home. Kids can have a very potent effect on us.”

But is it possible that the effect they’re having is a little too potent?

Call me a crabby old baby boomer, but I’m tired of parents who let children commandeer every conversation. And should they be allowed to bully us with their concerns? Maybe they’re telling us they’re tired of the pressure to get into the right college. Maybe they’re getting back at parents fixated on their nutrition or video games.

It can’t help that children are living in a transfat-banning, nanny-state culture.

They are asked to sign pledges at school never to smoke, drink or try drugs. They are inspired by zealous organizations to monitor parental drinking. One father I know was called a drug addict by his son for having a couple of beers after work.

Yes, they have good reason not to want parents to smoke, drink or abuse drugs.

But does that mean a 9-year-old from Connecticut should propose a smoking ban in cars where there are minors? That happened last year, when a boy, with his mother’s help, contacted his state representative and collected 200 signatures. The proposed ban has been introduced into the state legislature.

Of course, parents are also touched by children concerned for their health.

That’s why one mother I know has quietly endured Post-it notes all over her home asking, “Do you want to die?” Others let children pull cigarettes out of their mouths and the mouths of their friends. Another mother I know, who smokes occasionally, tells her son she appreciates his concern, but she has to make her own decisions. It’s as if she’s explaining herself to a strict father.

“I think it’s nice to respect the wishes of young people,” said Ann Dexter-Jones, a smoker and mother of five grown children. “But we’ve forgotten who makes the rules in our society. And there’s a fine line between showing concern and bad manners.”

It all comes down to that, doesn’t it?

As for my nephew, he has agreed to lighten up when we light up.

“So we’re O.K. on the occasional smoking thing?” I asked him.

“Sure, Uncle Bob,” he said. “But we still have to talk about drinking.”

Bartender!