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To the Editor: The article by Ms Friedman¹ on the future of Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) significantly misses the mark. It fails to make clear that the conversion controversy is more about regulators and consumers preventing nonprofit BCBS plans from taking public assets for use in the for-profit sector than it is about the survival of individual insurance companies. Conversion is not simply a technical corporate change, it is about the preservation of billions of nonprofit charitable dollars and how these dollars should be used to protect and improve communities' health.

Nonprofit entities, including the majority of BCBS plans, are not owned by their boards, executives, or officers. The public is effectively the "shareholder" of a nonprofit organization's assets. In almost every state, the law requires a nonprofit organization's assets to be "irrevocably dedicated" to nonprofit purposes. When the company changes to a mutual or stock insurance company, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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