Insurance Insider Blows the Whistle on Practices
For almost 20 years, Wendell Potter worked inside giant insurance companies, most recently as the VP of Corporate Communications for the CIGNA Corporation. He has left and now is speaking out. Watch him Friday night on Bill Moyers Journal tell secrets the industry would rather you not know. Potter also has a blog (Wendell Potter’s Blog) and is a Senior Fellow on Health Care with the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit group dedicated to uncovering the public relations influences over government, opinion, and public policy.
Potter was the spokesman when CIGNA denied a transplant to a 17-year-old teen who needed one to live. Because of the bad publicity, the insurance giant caved in, but it was too late, Nataline Sarkisyan died, according to an account. That was part of Potter’s transformation as was seeing a giant health fair in Virginia, where the nonprofit group, Remote Area Medical, brings doctors and nurses to remote areas to help the uninsured and underinsured. They were being treated at state fairgrounds in cleaned out animal stalls. Welcome to health care in America where about 50 million people do not have health insurance.
If you have ever been treated badly by Big Insurance, please spend some time learning what happens from this insider who recently testified to Congress about what he has seen. ( Potter Testimony Transcript- Senate Commerce Committee, June 24, 2009)
At Farah and Farah, our Jacksonville personal injury attorneys run into the reluctance of insurers to pay claims every day. Potter explains that keeping profitable satisfies investors and Wall Street, and he reminds us that profit drives the insurance industry, not paying claims.
It is a voice we rarely hear, while what dominates the airwaves are scare stories from pseudo-consumer groups, actually funded by the insurance industry, that is trying to tell us that we don’t want healthcare like Canada or Europe. See their ads at Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, a front group run by a former hospital chief executive and multimillionaire investor. As our country tries to figure out how to make basic health care an American right, understand what role the large industry plays in shaping public opinion.
