Posted on 11/02/2009 12:00:24 PM PST by newgeezer
IOWA CITY — Wendell Potter refers to the health insurance industry as “masters of deceit.” It’s not a slam from an outsider.
Potter, 58, of Philadelphia, was once one of them.
After a 20-year career in public relations that ended as chief corporate spokesman of CIGNA Corp., one of the nation’s largest health insurers, Potter left last year.
“I told them I just didn’t want to do it anymore,” he said in a phone interview with The Gazette.
At the time, he didn’t plan on speaking out against the industry where he had honed a successful career.
But after seeing the insurance industry use the “same dirty tricks” to kill health care reform as it had in the 1990s, Potter said he changed his mind. “I wasn’t shocked to see it, but I was just mad,” he said of those tactics.
He will speak at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Iowa, as part of the University Lecture Series.
Potter testified last summer in front of a U.S. Senate committee, describing the methods he said the industry uses to confuse customers and dump the sick to satisfy investors.
“To help meet Wall Street’s relentless profit expectations, insurers routinely dump policyholders who are less profitable or who get sick,” Potter testified.
He described policy rescission, in which companies look to see if a sick policyholder has omitted a minor illness on an application for coverage and then use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment.
Potter has appeared on CNN, ABC News, “Bill Moyers Journal” and in Time magazine.
Potter believes a public plan is essential for real reform but he said the insurance industry has spread misinformation and created fears to manipulate public opinion.
Public relations firms are hired to disseminate talking points to talk show hosts that end up on radio, television and opinion pages of newspapers, he said, and scare tactics are used with seniors who fear they will lose Medicare.
“This is intentional to get people to believe these lies and to get these people so upset that they go to these meetings and carry signs,” Potter said.
Still, he is hopeful that a final health reform measure will include a public option, which he sees as the only way to create a competitor that has influence in the marketplace.
“A public option would offer an alternative,” Potter said, “a balance to the greedy ways of the insurance industry.”
I'm guessing this lecture will look like a leftover Halloween freak show.
You got it. And of course none of those bad things will ever happen under government controlled health care....;)
This guy is a text-book example of what Lenin referred to as a “useful idiot,” useful, that is, to Lenin and his Bolsheviks.
A public option would offer an alternative,” Potter said, “a balance to the greedy ways of the insurance industry.”
Same company, new boss..............
While I do not doubt that insurance companies have treated people badly and dropped sick people using the tactics he described, Pelosi’s government run HELLcare is not the answer, no matter what!
Yes, greedy government ways to balance greedy insurance industry ways.
“He described policy rescission, in which companies look to see if a sick policyholder has omitted a minor illness on an application for coverage and then use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment.”
Without blowing up the entire system, seems like this would be relatively easy to fix legislatively, allow for higher premium amount charged to the insured, and then fine or prosecute the company if they drop the insured.
I’m sure as a lifelong PR flak, this clown knows all about the inner workings of the health care industry.
He is going to give back all the money he made from the ‘evil’ corporation?
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Now a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is a progressive nonprofit American-based media research group founded in 1993 by environmentalist writer and political activist John Stauber.
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Wendell Potter
CNN’s Roberts Omits Far Left Affiliation of ‘Inside’ Health Care Guest
Also he is giving this speech in a town with one of America’s largest hospitals. U. of Iowa Hospitals is the third largest employer in Iowa after John Deere and Hy-Vee grocery stores.
I don’t think his lecture will be anywhere near the hospital.
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