![On January 19, 2012, the Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson filed a complaint in U.S. District Court against Accretive Health, a debt collection company hired by many medical institutions with the task of collecting on past-due payments by its patients.
The complaint, which you can read here (note: the complaint has since been amended), alleged Accretive Health violated, among other things, federal patient privacy laws (“HIPPA”) and state debt collection regulations.
After filing the complaint, Swanson’s office issued a press release on the matter. Three months later, the lawsuit made the front page of the New York Times newspaper. The Times story, which was later redistributed by other news outlets, caused Accretive Health to go into damage mode.
The company issued statement after statement regarding a three-month-old court case that, until last Tuesday, had gone largely unnoticed (it’s worth noting Accretive Health’s website offers no statement on the court case before April 29; on Monday, the company filed a motion to dismiss the claim against it).
As you can see from this chart showing Accretive Health’s stock price over the past six months, the company was hardly impacted by the lawsuit in January, but lost over 50 percent of its stock value after the Times article ran last Tuesday.
You can draw your own conclusion as to how the media impacts the market.
[Chart: Reuters | Article cross-posted from here]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3ayjelSUW1qz5ew6o1_1280.png)
On January 19, 2012, the Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson filed a complaint in U.S. District Court against Accretive Health, a debt collection company hired by many medical institutions with the task of collecting on past-due payments by its patients.
The complaint, which you can read here (note: the complaint has since been amended), alleged Accretive Health violated, among other things, federal patient privacy laws (“HIPPA”) and state debt collection regulations.
After filing the complaint, Swanson’s office issued a press release on the matter. Three months later, the lawsuit made the front page of the New York Times newspaper. The Times story, which was later redistributed by other news outlets, caused Accretive Health to go into damage mode.
The company issued statement after statement regarding a three-month-old court case that, until last Tuesday, had gone largely unnoticed (it’s worth noting Accretive Health’s website offers no statement on the court case before April 29; on Monday, the company filed a motion to dismiss the claim against it).
As you can see from this chart showing Accretive Health’s stock price over the past six months, the company was hardly impacted by the lawsuit in January, but lost over 50 percent of its stock value after the Times article ran last Tuesday.
You can draw your own conclusion as to how the media impacts the market.
[Chart: Reuters | Article cross-posted from here]
To patients, the debt collectors may look indistinguishable from hospital employees, may demand they pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all, even using scripts like those in collection boiler rooms, according to the documents and employees interviewed by The New York Times.
I think the reason people can’t stand cable news is because of lost potential. They have 24 hours with which to fill their show with news and yet they spend nearly all of it mulling over and opinionating on the same three issues driving the week. You can turn on CNN or Fox News four different times during the day and see them discussing the same topic all four times. Imagine if there were a news organization that was a mashup of NPR and the New York Times, that actually aimed to carry a wide breadth of coverage that extended beyond the left/right dichotomy.
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