State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler underwent what his office said was successful heart surgery Monday.

His office says Kreidler, 69, called today and “sounds as if he’s well on the road to recovery” after bypass and valve-replacement surgery at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia. The surgery had been planned after doctors monitored him for months, his office said.

Filling in for Kreidler is acting chief deputy Deb McCurley, the deputy insurance commissioner for operations, who said in a statement that people who deal with the office shouldn’t notice any change.

Kreidler was re-elected in November to a fourth term.

Washington Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler says the controversial Reproductive Parity Act pending in the Legislature is not essential to have in the next two years, because the state’s health insurers that cover maternity services are locked in to also covering abortion. But Kreidler said the Legislature should write that coverage into state law this year in anticipation that things could change under Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, in the out years.

“That is where there is nervousness right now,” he said of lawmakers’ interest in passing Senate Bill 5009 or House Bill 1044. …

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Three days before the election Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee and congressional candidate Denny Heck are making another swing through South Sound this afternoon, joined by the state’s two U.S. senators in Tacoma near the end of a 26-stop state “Tour for Jobs.”

The Tacoma stop is at 12:15 p.m. at IBEW Local 76’s hall, 3049 South 36th Ave. State Democrats say the focus is on tax credits and training programs that have put veterans to work. Among speakers are Inslee, U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, retiring 6th district Congressman Norm Dicks and 6th district candidate Derek Kilmer. Kilmer is fending off a well-funded challenge from Republican Bill Driscoll.

The next stop is in Olympia at 2:30 at the Thurston County Democrats’ campaign headquarters, 423 W. Fourth Ave.

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It would be his fourth term as the state’s insurance commissioner should incumbent Mike Kreidler win in November.

The former state lawmaker and one-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives said in an announcement this morning that he will make health care reform the centerpiece of this campaign.

“The people of our state have a right to choices for quality and affordable health care,” Kreidler said. “We can’t lose this opportunity to make sure that insurance companies compete on price and quality, not on how well they can avoid people with medical problems.”

Kreidler, a Democrat, was an optometrist in Olympia when he was elected to Congress in 1992. The retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserves, Kreidler took a leave of absence from the state Senate to serve stateside during the first Gulf War. He was temporarily replaced in that office by his wife Lela Kreidler.

The only other candidate for the office who has filed with the state Public Disclosure Commission is Republican Martin (Scott) Reilly.

Here is the statement Kreidler’s campaign released this morning: Read more »

It’s not just state employees and retirees being affected by problems at Regence Blue Shield, Washington’s insurance commissioner says.

Last week I wrote about Regence’s delays in paying doctors for treatment of retirees and others who use the state’s Uniform Medical Plan as secondary insurance. The backlog of unpaid claims had reached nearly 300,000.

Now Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler is wading in. He said Wednesday he has ordered parent company Regence Group to develop a plan for correcting its problems, after meeting Sept. 1 with fellow regulators from Oregon, Utah and Idaho and Regence CEO Mark Ganz.

The previously reported delays in processing Medicare-related claims are the biggest of the worries, but others seem to be unrelated to those difficulties. For example, Kreidler said Regence’s computer system malfunctioned Aug. 5, causing more than 6,000 billing errors.

Patients’ bank accounts were debited for money they didn’t owe, probably because of inaccurate routing numbers, Kreidler said — and in more than 200 cases, the accounts belonged to people who weren’t even Regence customers.

Some withdrawals reached into the thousands of dollars, Kreidler said. And some of the bills that went to the wrong people contained Regence customers’ names and identification numbers, which weren’t supposed to be disclosed.

“The Regence Group needs to gets its act together,” Kreidler said in a statement. Read more »