In this article in the Minneapolis StarTribune, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson reveals that Rahm Emanuel sent her a letter requesting she hold off her pursuit of Accretive Health. Accretive Health has been under fire for their collection practices at Fairview Hospitals in the Twin Cities and is being investigated for possible violations of federal law.
Accretive Health was hired by Fairview as an outsourced collection agency, although they have dressed up their role in all sorts of flowery language. The executives from Fairview who contracted with Accretive disclosed that their sons worked at Accretive, and somehow that wasn't seen as a conflict of interest.
Once they were brought in, Accretive pissed off enough people to eventually catch the interest of Attorney General Swanson and the StarTribune. They would routinely ask people in the emergency room for payment up front and imply that was necessary before receiving care. Their practices are well documented in this article from the StarTribune. Eventually Fairview kicked them out.
Accretive Health is a Chicago-based company, so they turned to their local Democratic fixer, Rahm, to take care of the matter. We need better Democrats like Lori Swanson working for the 99% instead of like Rahm Emanuel carrying water for the greedy and shady 1%.