"The industry...didn’t like seeing those countries’ healthcare systems depicted in a positive light"

[marmar]

from Democracy Now!:



“They Dump the Sick to Satisfy Investors”: Insurance Exec Turned Whistleblower Wendell Potter Speaks Out Against Healthcare Industry

As the debate over healthcare reform intensifies on Capitol Hill, we spend the hour with a former top insurance executive who’s now exposing the industry’s dirty secrets. Wendell Potter once served as the head of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies. We speak to Potter about his own transformation from industry mouthpiece to whistleblower, the healthcare industry’s extensive PR and lobbying machine, the campaign to discredit Michael Moore’s film Sicko, and the insurance industry’s most pressing task: the fight against a public option, let alone a single-payer system.


Guest:

Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications at insurance giant CIGNA. He is now a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy.


AMY GOODMAN: As the healthcare reform debate intensifies on Capitol Hill, we spend the hour today with a former top executive from one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies who has begun exposing some of the industry’s dirty secrets. This whistleblower testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation last month.

WENDELL POTTER: My name is Wendell Potter, and for twenty years I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies. And I saw how they confused their customers and dumped the sick, so all they—so also they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.

AMY GOODMAN: Wendell Potter joins us today for the hour.

Up until last year he was the head of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest for-profit health insurance companies. He served as CIGNA’s chief corporate spokesperson. He also once headed communications at Humana, another large for-profit health insurer. In 2007, Wendell Potter helped spearhead the healthcare industry’s campaign against Michael Moore’s movie Sicko. Today he is a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy and is becoming one of the most prominent industry whistleblowers.


I sat down with Wendell Potter earlier this week.

WENDELL POTTER: I worked for CIGNA for fifteen years, and I was a spokesman or spokesperson for CIGNA for all of that time, and probably the last four or five years I was the head of corporate communications and also the chief spokesman for the company.

AMY GOODMAN: So why have you decided to speak out?

WENDELL POTTER: You know, when I left, I left voluntarily. It was a little over a year ago. I just decided I didn’t want to keep doing that. I had no longer felt that what I was doing was the right thing. But I didn’t decide to start speaking out until just earlier this year, when I started seeing the evidence that the insurance industry’s PR and lobbying campaigns were apparently paying off, like they did in the early ’90s when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan, and how they’ve killed every meaningful healthcare reform initiative since then.

AMY GOODMAN: But you were a critical part of that, being in communications and then head of communications at CIGNA.

WENDELL POTTER: I was. I was a person who was often speaking for not just the company, but sometimes the industry. I spent a lot of time working with my colleagues at other companies on task forces and trade association committees to help develop the strategy and the tactics. So, yes, I did a lot of that. So, as a consequence, I know pretty much the game plan that they have developed and used and the talking points that they use and send out to people who they think will say the things they want them to say.

AMY GOODMAN: And what are those talking points? What is the game plan of the health insurance industry?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, the game plan is based on scare tactics. And, of course, the thing they fear most is that the country will at some point gravitate toward a single-payer plan. That’s the ultimate fear that they have. But currently—and they know that right now that is not something that’s on the legislative table. And they’ve been very successful in making sure that it isn’t. They fear even the public insurance option that’s being proposed, that was part of President Obama’s campaign platform, his healthcare platform. And they’ll pull out all the stops they can to defeat that.

And they’ll be working with their ideological allies, with the business community, with conservative pundits and editorial writers, to try to scare people into thinking that embracing a public health insurance option would lead us down the slippery—excuse me, slippery slope toward socialism and that you will be, in essence, putting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor. That is—you know, they’ve used those talking points for years, and in years past they’ve always worked. ..............(more)

The complete piece is, in transcript, audio & video formats, is at: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/16/former_insurance_exec_wendell_porter

[kenfrequed]

1. Yet another reason...

That we should have started and single payer universal and then compromised for a public care option. This is the problem with letting the corporations and insurance lobby dictate through the DLC what is to be considered on or off the table.

[Wednesdays]

2. K&R

:kick:

[slipslidingaway]

3. knr #12 n/t

[crickets]

4. Kicking

[rollingrock]

5. He was no doubt inspired by Sicko

to speak out. that movie really put the healthcare issue on the map like nothing else could.