Meet Wendell Potter. I'm sorry you don't already know him. I'm grateful you'll have the chance.
Mr Potter spent years as the head of corporate communications for large health insurance companies Humana and Cigna. He walked away from a six-figure salary because he could no longer spin the insurance industry's talking points, an industry who's focus has shifted in recent decades from patient care to satisfying their Wall Street investors.
I had the great honor of meeting Mr. Potter, who has written a book, Deadly Spin, that goes into great detail about how your insurance company is using your premium dollars to bankroll the relentless propaganda and lobbying efforts focused on protecting their seemingly endless profits. He didn't have to do this. He's not exactly a young guy. He could have stuck it out a few more years, raked in comfortable money, and sailed into an easy retirement. But a crisis of conscience, building for years, was solidified by a trip to a free health fair on a visit back home in east Tennessee. A few miles away in Wise County, Virginia, he witnessed as America joined the Third World:
"Nothing prepared me for what I saw as I walked through the gates... I felt as if I'd stepped into a movie set or war zone. Hundreds of people, many of them soaking wet from the rain that had been falling all morning, were waiting in lines that stretched out of view. As I walked around, I noticed that some of those lines led to barns and cinder block buildings with row after row of animal stalls, where doctors and nurses were treating patients. Other people were being treated by dentists under open sided tents. Many were lying on gurneys on rain-soaked pavement. Except for curtains serving as makeshift doors on animal stalls, there was little privacy. ...Dentists were pulling teeth and filling cavities, optometrists were examining eyes for glaucoma and cataracts, doctors and nurses were doing Pap smears and mammograms, surgoens were cutting out skin cancers, and gastroenterologists were conducting sigmoidoscopies. Huge amounts of medications were being dispensed. ... As I took in the scene at the Wise County Fairgrounds, I realized that the folks in those lines and animal stalls could have been my relatives or my parents' neighbors. I could tell from their faces that they were people with whom I shared cultural roots, but who-for whatever reason-simply hadn't had the good fortune to land a high-paying job and a cushy office in a Philadelphia skyscraper. ... Among the reasons I finally left my job at CIGNA was that with each promotion, I got a better understanding of how insurers get rid of enrollees they don't want-the very people who need insurance-when they become a drain on profits. ... The power of my experience in Wise County really hit home a couple of weeks later as I was boarding one of the two private jets CIGNA uses to fly executives around the country. ... As usual, on this flight, a uniformed attendant brought me lunch on a gold-rimmed plate and handed me gold plated flatware with which to eat it. My thoughts turned immediately to the people I had seen being treated in animal stalls just days earlier. A few months later, I saw an article in Architectural Digest ... it described a 24 room mansion ... it didn't disclose the name of the retired executive for whom this mansion was built, but it was common knowledge in the executive suite at CIGNA who lived there. It was the company's former chairman and CEO, Wilson Taylor, whose salary in 2000, his last year with the company, was 24 million dollars-which doesn't include the additional millions he reaped from stock options and deferred compensation. When I read that article and saw the stunning pictures of Taylor's new place, it became clear to me, in ways that it hadn't before, that people enrolled in CIGNA's insurance plans had actually helped pay for that 24 room stone manse with it's 17th century Spanish columns and it's impossibly French kitchen. Furthermore, I could now see clearly, those people in Wise County would not have had to stand in line in the rain for hours to get get care in animal stalls if so much of the money Americans spend for health care didn't wind up in the pockets of insurance company executives and their Wall Street masters."
This is just a small part of the real story about what's happening with healthcare in this country. Does this sound like the richest, most successful democracy in the history of civilization to you? Can you actually support this immoral inequality? We have the greatest healthcare on Earth-if you have means to obtain it. Are you lucky enough to have insurance? Don't get too comfortable, it can disappear at any moment. And no reforms Washington or any one else ever enacts will make a meaningful difference until we eliminate the strongest deterrent to equal healthcare access: the insurance companies.
