Doctors Write Their Own Prescription For A Health Insurance Company

More than 4,000 physicians - over half of those who practice in Washington state - are participants in a new health insurance company owned and operated by doctors.

Unified Physicians of Washington was founded under the auspices of the Washington State Medical Association.

UPW President Jim Peterson says a major aim is to “send a message to the rest of the marketplace.”

It is a message about “putting care back into the hands of the care givers and patients,” says Peterson. As such, it is an alternative to more and more “corporation health plans in which patients and physicians have to get a goodly number of permission slips to go forward with the care. And there are serious questions about efficiency and quality.”

Another part of the message has to do with compensation at the top. Unlike health insurance chief executive officers whose annual compensation runs into the millions, Peterson receives $174,000 a year.

“This is part of the equation the company is committed to as it aims to dedicate 90 cents of every dollar to the actual delivery of care,” says UPW spokeswoman Clarice Hutchinson.

Nationally, between 25 cents and 30 cents of each health care dollar go into corporate coffers, says Peterson. Locally, the figure is more like 18 cents to 20 cents, he says.

“One of the reasons we don’t have high overhead is that we at UPW are a very flat organization,” Peterson says. “We don’t have a vast hierarchy of vice presidents and assistant vice presidents managing great numbers of workers who oversee and pass judgment on yet other people’s medical decisions - second-guessing care givers on the spot. We delegate those responsibilities back to the physician.”

Spokane industrialist Judi Williams, who represents business on the 15-member UPW board, said of this approach, “It respects the integrity of the patient-physician relationship.

“As an employer, that’s important to me,” said the executive vice president of Telect Inc. “It means a healthier, happier employee.”

Tomato Bros. takes new name

“Tomato Bros. is now Tomato Street, but you’ll never taste the change,” says John Everett, president.

The name of the popular Italian restaurants in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene is being changed because the owners plan to franchise the concept. Everett said owners of the two existing Tomato Bros. restaurants found someone else had beaten them to the name when they applied for a national trademark.

Locally, Tomato Bros. got its start with conversion of the Bonanza Steakhouse in Coeur d’Alene to a pasta and pizza format three years ago. The Spokane Bonanza Steakhouse followed suit a year later.

“Both restaurants have been doing so well since the conversions that we decided to market our concept, menu, recipes, ambience, knowledge and experience,” said Everett.

Franchise principals include Cyrus O’Leary’s owner Cy Vaughn, whose innovations in dining over a 30-year career have made him a local food-service institution.

US West wins kudos

Responding to a recent column in which a reader criticized US West Cellular, Jim Shamp of Cheney has come to the defense of the phone company.

“Several weeks ago,” he writes, “my cell phone number was cloned and $2,500 in calls were charged to me. US West caught the problem and canceled the bill before I even knew about the problem. It took two short, pleasant calls to the company to get a new number and have the excise tax dropped.

“By contrast, my October payroll withholdings were credited by the Internal Revenue Service to the month of September, thus putting them into the wrong quarter. Since then, I have exchanged at least a dozen letters and phone calls with the IRS’ Utah office, and the problem still is not straightened out.

“Needless to say, I prefer dealing with private companies.”

Washington ‘poised to accelerate’

After five years of sluggishness marked by a major Boeing downturn, a drop in cross-border shopping and cutbacks at Hanford, “Washington seems poised to accelerate.”

That optimistic outlook comes from John W. Mitchell, chief economist of U.S. Bank.

Writing in the bank’s semiannual economic Barometer, the regional economist said major high-tech expansions in Western Washington “will tighten labor markets, increase incomes and trigger expansion of support activities.

“This accumulation of strength combined with the healthy agricultural sector will,” he predicted, “make Washington an above-average state when the 1996 figures come in next year.”

, DataTimes MEMO: Associate Editor Frank Bartel writes a notes column each Wednesday. If you have business items of regional interest for future columns, call 459-5467 or send a fax to 459-5482.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Frank Bartel The Spokesman-Review