Rick Dahms
Slade slayer? Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn readies for hand-to-hand political combat against our senior senator, Slade Gorton.
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Early last year, Premera Blue Cross told Jay Ellison, a Kent father of four suffering from a rapidly degenerative form of multiple sclerosis, that it had decided not to cover the stem cell transplant recommended by his doctors because the costly treatment was experimental. A consumer group who had taken on Ellison's case set up a meeting with state Insurance Commissioner Deborah Senn, who immediately swung into action. Ellison recalls: "She called [Premera] on the phone right in front of me and said, 'I want to know why you're not going to save Jay Ellison.'" When that failed to produce results, her office showed Ellison how to get Premera to hold an expedited appeals hearing, to which Senn sent a delegate. Again, Premera refused to pay for the operation.
After the hearing, Ellison remembers, "We were all crying on the way home in the car," when the commissioner called him on his cell phone. "It's not over," she said, persuading him to let her hold a news conference asking the public for donations, which she did the very next morning. "Within four hours, I was cleared for a transplant," he says. An anonymous donor had come forward. Performed last March, the operation, contrary to all expectations, reversed instead of merely halted the progression of his disease. Once confined to a wheelchair, Ellison can now walk a few hundred feet at a time.
He believes he owes it all to Senn. "She said, 'Look, this man is worth saving.' By her involvement in my case, I was saved."
To put it mildly, Senn now has Ellison's support in a fight of her own, one to capture the US Senate seat long held by Republican Slade Gorton. It won't be easy. As usual, Democrats from Olympia to DC think they can topple Gorton this time, believing that his consistently narrow margins of victory make him vulnerable. But the intellectual and well-organized Gorton has proved a persistent survivor and awesome fundraiser. A close advisor to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, he is arguably at the height of his power.
In Senn, however, the Democrats have an unusual candidate: a hell-raising populist who during her seven years in office has earned a devoted following and a national, even international, reputation for battling insurance companies on behalf of the little guy. Her main preoccupation has been the health care morass, one of the most important, emotional, and complex problems of our time. Not only has she personally gotten involved in numerous cases like Ellison's, but she has challenged insurance companies' proposed rate hikes and drawn up rules that have dramatically changed the way they do business.
In the process, she has been labeled abrasive, and some charge that she has actually made matters worse. But consumer advocates like Ralph Nader can't speak highly enough of her. "She is the best insurance commissioner in the US, hands down," Nader says. "Most other insurance commissioners just do what industry wants them to do."
To her backers, the logic of her candidacy is what Senn volunteer Martha Lynn-Johnson of Bremerton calls a "no-brainer." "She's so dynamic, she's done so much," Johnson enthuses after seeing Senn speak at a Bremerton union hall. "It's obvious she's just going to get out there and fight for people. I can't understand why everyone in the world is not behind her."
That's just it. Everyone is not behind her, even in her own party. The state Democrats' worst kept secret as Senn has been out campaigning over the past year is that they have been searching for someone else to run. Aspirations settled alternately on Governor Gary Locke and state Attorney General Christine Gregoire, both of whom said no. Finally, late last month, former congresswoman and high-tech executive Maria Cantwell ended months of Hillary Clintonesque elusiveness and officially announced her candidacy.
Whatever the comparative strengths of candidates, there is in some quarters an antipathy towards Senn that runs surprisingly deep. "I've never quite seen somebody run a race of this kind that elicits such negative feel- ing," says fellow Democrat and former Mt. Vernon legislator Rob Johnson. The question is, why? Is there really something about Senn that discredits her, or are the Democrats merely too timid and comfortable to embrace a real reformer? Put another way, are the Democrats crazy or is she?
To be sure, the Senn hate club is somewhat mythological. Several people I contact who supposedly can't stand the commissioner end up singing her praises, and in a way that make it seem doubtful that they are changing their tune for the press. But when I hit the right person, I get a stream of vitriol.
"She is the most ruthless politician I have run across in 15 years of politics," says Phil Dyer, a former Republican legislator now serving on the Sammamish City Council. He accuses her of "heavy-duty rhetoric and flat-out lies," and charges that her motivation is suspect. "She's in it for Deborah's ego."
Dyer has had particular cause to clash with Senn. As the vice president of a company that sells malpractice insurance to doctors and hospitals, Dyer was the architect of several bills friendly to the insurance industry, including a landmark one in 1995 that rolled back most of the health care reforms passed two years earlier. In 1997, Dyer then tried to eliminate one of the few remaining reforms, the one prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions. Though it was the governor who vetoed the bill, Dyer is still steaming at the way Senn expressed her opinion.
