Consumer Watchdog executive director Carmen Balber has been with the organization for overtwo decades. She spent four years directing the group’s Washington, D.C. office where she advocated for key health insurance market reforms that were ultimately enacted into law as part of the Affordable Care Act.
Balber is recognized as a leading expert on a wide range of personal insurance issues and has authored or co-authored numerous reports on the auto, health and medical malpractice insurance industries, and insurance rate regulation. Her recent advocacy focuses on the impacts of climate change and insurance industry accountability for rising prices and reduced access to insurance for homeowners and renters.
She also leads Consumer Watchdog’s advocacy to improve patient safety in California, including campaigns to win new access to justice for victims of medical negligence by updating the state’s cap on medical malpractice damages; winning a voice for injured consumers at the Medical Board of California; and legislation requiring doctors to check a patient’s prescription history before prescribing opioids and other drugs. In 2012, she managed the coalition effort to defeat Prop 33, a $17 million insurance industry initiative that would have raised rates on good drivers. She has appeared as a commentator on these topics on broadcasts and in publications across the country.
As an organizer with Consumer Watchdog, Balber ran campaigns to pass volunteer-qualified ballot measures enacting the nation’s strongest municipal conflict of interest protections in five cities across California. She also coordinated citizen organizing efforts in Consumer Watchdog’s successful volunteer lobbying effort to block a legislative utility bailout in Sacramento in 2001.
Before joining Consumer Watchdog, Balber learned the ropes at the Colorado and Washington PIRGs. She holds a B.A. in Politics from Pomona College in Claremont, California and is a graduate of UWC-USA in Montezuma, New Mexico, one of 17 secondary schools across the globe dedicated to making education a force for peace, sustainability and change by bringing together youth from a diversity of countries and cultures to live and learn. She is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Anishinaabe).
Consumer Watchdog Report Calls On California Officials To Watch For Oil Company Production Cut Backs As Ploy To Raise Gas Prices & Undermine Cap...
Oakland, CA – The nonprofit Consumer Watchdog released a report chronicling the tactics California oil companies are likely to use to undermine implementation of climate protection laws and warned state officials they include artificially hiking the price of gasoline.
$312,000 In Savings A Day
$312,000 a day or $114 million this year. That's how much Consumer Watchdog challenges to excessive auto and homeowners insurance rates saved California families in 2014.
California Supreme Court To Review Constitutionality of Medical Malpractice Damages Cap
SANTA MONICA, CA: The California Supreme Court said today it will review the constitutionality of the state’s arbitrary 39-year-old damages cap of $250,000 in medical malpractice cases in Hughes v. Pham. Last week, Consumer Watchdog wrote an amicus letter asking the Court to review Hughes and overturn this decades-old injustice.
ABC Report Underscores Need For Better Public Disclosure, Audit of Medical Errors At Hospitals
SANTA MONICA, CA: Following an ABC News 10 investigation into over a thousand adverse events reported in 42 northern Central Valley hospitals, Consumer Watchdog reiterated its call on Governor Brown and state health regulators to audit hospitals for failures to report many instances of patient harm and for full public disclosure of these events.
CA Medical Board Must Investigate Drug Company Payments to Doctors Prescribing Psychiatric Drugs To Foster Children
SANTA MONICA, CA: Following a report that prescription drug manufacturers have paid or spent more than $14 million to doctors who prescribe drugs to children in California’s foster care system, Consumer Watchdog called on the California Medical Board to expand an investigation into doctors who prescribed dangerous and unapproved psychotropic medications to children.
Consumer Watchdog Calls On Gov. Brown to Audit Reports Of Thousands of Medical Errors At Hospitals
SANTA MONICA, CA: Following a report that thousands of medical errors were reported by California’s hospitals in the last four years, Consumer Watchdog called on Governor Brown and state health regulators to audit hospitals for failures to report many instances of patient harm and for full public disclosure of these events.
Consumer Watchdog Asks California Supreme Court To Overturn Cap on Medical Malpractice Damages
SANTA MONICA, CA: Consumer Watchdog has joined the plaintiffs in Hughes v. Pham in asking that the California Supreme Court review the constitutionality of the state’s arbitrary 39-year-old damages cap of $250,000 in medical malpractice cases.
Doctors Charging Medicare Millions To Test Seniors for PCP
SANTA MONICA, CA – Doctors are charging Medicare millions for apparently unnecessary tests of seniors for illegal drugs like cocaine and PCP according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicare payment data.
A San Diego company, Millennium Laboratories, was paid $190 million from Medicare in 2012 including $4.5 million for PCP tests, more than any other California company.