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Wendell Potter, formerly head of corporate communications for insurance giant CIGNA, has left the company and is speaking out about the ways in which insurance companies peddle influence in Washington to maintain the status quo and oppose universal healthcare.
As seen in an introduction to his interview with Bill Moyers that is well worth watching, Potter testified before Congress:
Recently it became abundantly clear to me that the industry’s charm offensive, which is the most visible part of a duplicitous and well-financed PR and lobbying campaign, may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans.
The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent and accountable, publicly accountable health care option as, quote, “government-run health care.” What we have today, Mr. Chairman, is Wall Street-run health care that has proven itself an untrustworthy partner to its customers, to the doctors and hospitals who deliver care and to the state and federal governments that attempt to regulate it.
In the course of his interview with Bill Moyers he talks about his “conversion”, the duplicity of the industry and why we should be surprised if any meaningful change is made by Washington insiders, the Obama administration included.
Check out the second part of the interview on YouTube, the full interview with Bill Moyers, the introduction to the Potter interview, Wendell Potter’s recent article at PR Watch on the health care industry vs. reform, and his bio.
Among other things, Potter explains that the health care industry ran an organized campaign to discredit Michael Moore’s Sicko because they viewed it as dangerous.
BILL MOYERS: Was [Sicko] true? Did you think it contained a great truth?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely [it] did.
BILL MOYERS: What was it?
WENDELL POTTER: That we shouldn’t fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government and it’s been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don’t want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It’s more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you’re in now to one that you don’t want. You might be in the plan you like now.
But chances are, pretty soon, you’re going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you’re going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.
This is an important point: even if you currently have good coverage and/or benefit from the healthcare system, there is no guarantee that you won’t be ambushed by your insurer in the future.
Also worth reading is Trudy LIeberman’s interview with Wendell Potter in the Columbia Journalism Review, which touches on deficiencies of the media and the ways that corporate PR people manage relationships with journalists to get favorable stories published.
I can’t recall a reporter ever probing how insurers manage to meet Wall Street’s expectations through medical management and claims practices, which are key ways to manipulate the medical loss ratio and dump unprofitable accounts. Not once was I asked by a reporter what happens to people who work for small and mid-sized companies that get “purged” by insurers because their employees’ claims were causing the insurer’s medical loss ratio to move in the wrong direction from an investor’s point of view. No one ever asked me about the human consequences of satisfying Wall Street. Most reporters are happy to do a superficial job.
It seems to me that the business of making money by denying treatment to people is fundamentally flawed and that health insurance should be left to nonprofit organizations or the government, entities which are not directly accountable to Wall Street. This makes me a big fan of the Chaffee People’s Clinic.
This is just another example of the rich waging class warfare against the rest of us. They have been doing this for well over a century. Don’t fall for talk show rhetoric and lies by rich pundits like O’Reily and Limbaugh. Wage the war against the rich by calling your congressman and demanding the single payer option.