Damo, you have made a concerted effort to remain woefully ignorant. I read your fear-mongering hit piece, but you have always refused to read or listen to a guy that spent
20 years as an insurance executive. The 'true believer' is YOU Damo. You are being fed very well funded propaganda.
Wendell Potter is former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the United States' largest health insurance companies. wiki
Wendell Potter: Rally Against Wall Street's Health Care Takeover
August 31, 2009
I would like to begin by apologizing to all of you for the role I played 15 years ago in cheating you out of a reformed health care system. Had it not been for greedy insurance companies and other special interests, and their army of lobbyists and spin-doctors like I used to be, we wouldn't be here today.
I'm ashamed that I let myself get caught up in deceitful and dishonest PR campaigns that worked so well, hundreds of thousands of our citizens have died, and millions of others have lost their homes and been forced into bankruptcy, so that a very few corporate executives and their Wall Street masters could become obscenely rich.
But it was only during the last few years of my career that I came to realize the full scope of the harm my colleagues and I had caused, and the lengths that insurance companies will go to increase their profits at the expense of working families.
As I told the Senate Commerce Committee two months ago, the higher up the corporate ladder I climbed, the more I could see how insurance companies confuse their customers and dump the sick – all so they can satisfy those Wall Street masters.
I described for the senators how insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and how they make it nearly impossible to understand -- or even to obtain -- information consumers need.
I also told the Committee how the industry has conducted duplicitous and well-financed PR and lobbying campaigns every time Congress has tried to reform our health care system -- and how its current behind-scenes-efforts may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans.
I noted that, just as the industry did 15 years ago when it led the effort to kill the Clinton reform plan, it is using shills and front groups to spread lies and disinformation to scare Americans away from the very reform that would benefit them most.
Make no mistake, the industry, despite its public assurances to be good-faith partners with the President and Congress, has been at work for years laying the groundwork for devious and often sinister campaigns to manipulate public opinion.
The industry goes to great lengths to keep its involvement in these campaigns hidden from public view. But I know from having served on many trade group committees that industry leaders are always full partners in developing strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with their ability to increase their companies' profits.
My involvement in those activities goes back to the early '90s when insurers joined with other special interests to finance the activities of an organization called the Healthcare Leadership Council, which led a coordinated effort to scare Americans and members of Congress away from the Clinton plan.
A few years after that victory, the insurers formed a front group called the Health Benefits Coalition to kill efforts to pass a Patients Bill of Rights. While it was touted as a broad-based business group, the Health Benefits Coalition in reality got the lion's share of its funding from Big Insurance.
Like most front groups, the Health Benefits Coalition was set up and run out of a big and well-connected PR firm. One of the key strategies developed by the PR firm as the coalition was gearing up for battle in late 1998 was to stir up support among conservative talk radio hosts and other media.
The PR firm formed alliances with groups like the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council and persuaded them to send letters to Congress and to appear at press conferences. The firm also launched an advertising campaign in conservative media outlets. The message was that President Clinton owed a debt to the liberal base of the Democratic Party and would try to pay back that debt by advancing the type of big government agenda on health care that he failed to get in 1993. Those tactics worked. Industry allies in Congress made sure the Patients' Bill of Rights would not become law.
The insurance industry has funded several other front groups since then whenever the industry has been under attack. It formed the Coalition for Affordable Quality Healthcare to try to improve the image of managed care in response to a constant stream of negative stories that appeared in the media in the late '90s and the first years of this decade.
It funded another front group when lawyers began filing class action lawsuits on behalf of doctors and patients.
The PR firm the industry hired to create that front group, by the way, had planned and conducted a similar campaign for the tobacco industry a few years earlier.
The insurance industry hired that same PR firm again in 2007 to help blunt the impact of Michael Moore's movie, "Sicko." It created and staffed a front group called "Health Care America" specifically to discredit Moore and to demonize the health care systems featured in the movie.
Among the tactics the PR firm used once again was to enlist the support of conservative talk show hosts, writers and editorial page editors to warn against a "government-takeover" of the U.S. health care system. The term "government-takeover" is one the industry has used many times over the years to scare people away from reform.
Health Care America also placed ads in newspapers. One of those ads carried this message, "In America, you wait in line to see a movie. In government-run health care systems, you wait to see a doctor."
With this history, you can rest assured that the insurance industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR practices it has used for many years, to kill reform this year, or even better, to shape reform so that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street investors far more than average Americans.
Americans need to be alert to how the industry and its allies are working to influence their opinions and lawmakers' votes. I know from years as an industry PR executive how effective insurers have been in using scare tactics to turn public opinion against any reform efforts that would threaten their profitability.
I warned earlier this year that Americans and the media should pay close attention to the efforts insurers and their ideological buddies would undertake to demonize health care systems around the world that don't allow for-profit insurance companies to have the free reign they have here.
Americans must realize that the when they hear isolated stories of long waiting times to see doctors in Canada and allegations that care in other systems is rationed by government bureaucrats, the insurance industry has written the script.
And Americans must realize that every time they hear we will be heading down the "slippery slope toward socialism" if Congress creates a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, some insurance flack like I used to be wrote that, too.
Every time you hear about the shortcomings of what they call "government-run" health care, remember this: what we have now in this country, and what the insurers are determined to keep in place, is Wall Street-run health care.
And know that we already have one of the most insidious means of rationing care in the world -- not by people we can hold accountable on election day but by insurance company executives who answer only to a few wealthy investors and hedge fund managers who care far more about earnings per share than your health and well-being.
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