HMOS UPSET WITH 'JOHN Q' FILM'S PORTRAYAL OF MANAGED CARE AS VILLAIN UNFAIR, INDUSTRY INSISTS.

Byline: Evan Pondel Staff Writer

The nation's leading health maintenance organizations say they are miscast as the villain in the new Denzel Washington film, in which the movie star plays a father battling the industry to save his son's life.

``John Q,'' a New Line Cinema film released today, is ``a misstatement of fact,'' said Dr. Allan Korn, chief medical officer of the Blue Shield Blue Cross Association. ``This kind of film erodes that trust established between a patient and HMO. ... How terribly upsetting to see it portrayed like this.''

Though wildly exaggerated, the movie sheds light on an industry criticized for sometimes being more about profits than patients. Differences with fiction aside, the industry is using the film to make the case for federal intervention in covering all Americans.

In the movie, John Q. Archibald's employer-sponsored health insurance refuses to cover his son's heart transplant because of price caps. When the hospital refuses to perform the surgery without guaranteed coverage, Archibald takes hostages and demands the life-saving operation.

``The health-care system is always portrayed as the bogeyman, but this film seems to depict a fragmented industry and this is something we feel strongly about,'' said Beverly Hayon, communications director with San Francisco-based Kaiser Permanente.

Blue Shield/Blue Cross and Kaiser are two of the 1,000 members of the American Association of Health Plans, which is sponsoring print advertisements that read ``John Q. It's not just a movie. It's a crisis for more than 40 million people who can't afford health care.''

``We think the movie shines a spotlight on a fundamental problem that Washington (D.C.) has essentially pushed aside - the uninsured and the underinsured,'' said Karen Ignagni, president of the association. ``And what is being emphasized is the hopelessness of people that do not have insurance.''

Oren Koules, who produced the New Line Cinema film, is dumbfounded as to why managed-care companies are upset about the film. He said the movie pins the title character's employer as the heavy, not the managed-care company.

``People aren't going to use the HMOs of the world as a yardstick to determine what movies they are going to see,'' he said Thursday. ``I think (HMOs) are in enough trouble as it is.''

From an HMO's perspective, drawing more attention to a burgeoning population of people who go uninsured may have been more tactful, said Lisa Haines, a spokeswoman for Woodland Hills-based Health Net who saw a screening of the film. But the underlying issue is the 40 million people who are underinsured and an estimated 45 million people who have no insurance.

``In the movie, the company said no to John Q because he was underinsured,'' Haines said. ``That isn't to say the movie didn't paint a bleak picture of the entire health-care system.''

``The real issue that should have been highlighted is that there is an insufficient amount of (donor) organs to go around in the world,'' Blue Shield's Korn said.

About 80,000 people in the United States are awaiting an organ transplant, while 6,000 people in need of those organs die each year, according to the United Network of Organ Sharing in Richmond, Va.

``For this reason, transplantation was a bit fictionalized in John Q,'' said Joel Newman, a spokesman for UNOS. ``What should be emphasized is the extreme gap between the availability of organs and those in need.''

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(1 -- 2; 1 -- color) ``John Q,'' the new film starring Denzel Washington, above, tells the story of a man who takes a hospital hostage because his insurance company refuses to fund a life-saving heart transplant for his son. Managed care companies have responded with a campaign, below, that disputes the idea of HMOs as uncaring corporate monsters and points the finger at politicians who allow millions of Americans to go without any health coverage at all.

New Line Cinema