Illinois paid more than 90 people at the PR firm FleishmanHillard at least $270 an hour to come up with “Wellinois” as the name of the state’s health care marketplace.
Focus groups rejected the proposal as “too cheesy,” and the PR firm retreated, finally coming up with “Get Covered Illinois” only a week before the opening of the healthcare marketplace set up under the Affordable Care Act.
These details come from an Associated Press story by Carla K. Johnson, an AP medical writer, who got the information from a series of open-records requests. The documents she obtained showed, among other things, that Illinois paid FleishmanHillard far more than other states paid for similar work. The state agreed to spend a total of $33 million promoting its healthcare marketplace, Johnson reported.
In a post for the Association of Health Care Journalists on how she got the story, Johnson said she filed a series of document requests, with one request leading to another. She ultimately filed 10 separate requests, she wrote. Here is some of what she says she learned from the project:
Background interviews with insiders are crucial when you’re writing about the PR industry where gossip is rampant, but no one will go on the record.
Sometimes it’s best to store up multiple documents until you can connect the dots into a picture.
Armed with numbers and other facts from the documents, your interview questions get more pointed and may even get you beyond the spin machine.
Johnson said the two-day series of stories she wrote from the documents and interviews ran on various front pages in Illinois.
(Thanks to Joanne Kenen, AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform, and the AHCJ Covering Health blog for alerting me to Johnson’s stories.)
-Paul Raeburn
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