ROCHESTER, NY, February 23, 2007

The debate over nonprofit versus for-profit status as it relates to health insurance and the impact on communities continues to draw attention. Questions about the role and performance of nonprofit health care organizations raise further concerns about these organizations' accountability to the public.

These and other issues are addressed in "Nonprofit Health Care and Insurance: Protecting the Public Interest," an article recently released as a Web Special for the journal INQUIRY. The piece contains highlights from a June 2006 conference, "The Role of Nonprofit Health Insurance in New Jersey: Protecting the Public Interest in an Era of Health Restructuring," held in Trenton, N.J., and co-sponsored by Consumers Union and the New Jersey Appleseed Public Interest Law Center.

The conference focused on New Jersey - in particular, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, New Jersey's largest health insurer - but the various presentations touched on concerns that cut across geographic regions and apply to the nonprofit sector as a whole. The INQUIRY article includes edited comments from the following panelists: Howard Berman, chairman of the board of the Alliance for Advancing Nonprofit Healthcare, and vice chairman, and former president and CEO, of the nonprofit Lifetime Healthcare Companies, which serve most of upstate New York; William J. Marino, president and CEO of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield; Mark Schlesinger, a professor in the Division of Health Policy and Administration at Yale University's School of Public Health, and one of the nation's leading scholars on nonprofit health care; and Deborah J. Chollet, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., in Washington, D.C., and an eminent researcher, whose recent work has examined the questions of public benefit of nonprofit insurers.

To read the article, go to http://www.inquiryjournal.org/ and click "Online Exclusive." The article is free and available to both subscribers and nonsubscribers of INQUIRY.