Pennsylvania Health Care for America Now
Continues To Protest Cigna
Cigna Victim Stacie Ritter to Seek Help from CEO
H. Edward Hanway at his mansion in Media, PA
Action Corresponds with New Television Ad Contrasting Insurance CEO’s Fancy Home with Average Foreclosed Home Due To Medical Bankruptcy
**Watch the new ad and Stacie Ritter talking about her situation and plan for today here: HealthCareforAmericaNow.org/Mansion**
Philadelphia, PA – As health insurance companies spend $641,000 a day to oppose meaningful health care reform, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) – the nation’s largest health care campaign – is continuing its effort to show Americans that that if the insurance companies win, we all lose.
On Thursday October 1st at 1:45 pm, Stacie Ritter will visit the home of Cigna CEO H. Edward Hanway in Media, PA to seek the help from him that his company will not provide. Ritter’s twin girls were afflicted with cancer at the age of 4, and Cigna refuses to cover the human growth hormone treatments they need to grow properly.
Ms. Ritter was bankrupted by a combination of high COBRA payments and out of pocket expenses when her husband suffered a brief period of unemployment. She continues to suffer financial hardship due to the inadequacy of Cigna insurance. She is charged a co-payment of $440 every time she takes her children for follow up treatments with specialists at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Ms. Ritter also worries that as her children get older, Cigna will deny them the additional treatments they will need to live full lives as curing their cancer severely damaged their pituitary glands.
On Thursday, Ms. Ritter will ask Mr. Hanway if she can move into the carriage house of his Main Line mansion—one of four homes he owns that together are worth more than $11 million. Cigna made $7.7 billion in profits from 2000-2008, and Mr. Hanway’s compensation of $124 million during that period is, in part, a product of business practices that deny people the medical care and affordable coverage they need.
Also on Thursday, HCAN will launch a new national television and online advertising campaign that juxtaposes the plight of people like Stacie Ritter with the excessive wealth of health insurance CEOs like Edward Hanway. The television ad titled “Mansion” will run in for two weeks in Philadelphia on local broadcast and cable television.
Thursday’s action is part of HCAN’s nationwide anti-insurance campaign called “Big Insurance: Sick of it.” HCAN is urging Congress to pass legislation that provides good, affordable health care with the choice of a public health insurance option which would give the private health insurance industry real competition and the American people real choice.
WHO: PA Health Care for America Now, Stacie Ritter
WHAT: Visit of Stacie Ritter, Cigna victim, to the home of Cigna
CEO H. Edward Hanway to correspond with new national advertising campaign.
WHERE: 1005 Bent Road, Media, Pa, 19063
WHEN: Thursday October 1st at 1:45 pm