Here’s A Guy Who Deserves a Prize!

Never heard of him? Well, Wendell Potter Should be a Household Name!

If you care about your health and the health and well-being of your loved ones, you’ve got to know this fellow by name.

Wendell Potter started speaking out against his old company, health insurance giant Cigna, last June and has been busy blowing the whistle hard ever since. As the former head of corporate communications, he knew what was going on in the health care for-profit business, and he realized that it was enough to make us all sick.

So, what does Potter think of the most recent Senate’s bill? He calls it a “gift to the insurance industry.” So much for our elected officials being on our side.

Here are some revealing quotes from his most recent testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee:

In the weeks since my June 24 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, I have expressed hope at every opportunity that this indeed might be the year Congress will enact legislation to reform our health care system in ways that will truly benefit Americans for generations to come.

But I have also expressed concern that if Congress goes along with the so-called “solutions” the insurance industry says it is bringing to the table and acquiesces to the demands it is making of lawmakers, and if it fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to the president might as well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.

And he should know what he is talking about—he used to be one of “them.” Potter continues:

While the reforms proposed in various bills before Congress would seemingly restrict insurance companies’ ability to put investors’ needs over those of consumers, Members must realize that provisions of some proposals, including the Baucus Framework, would actually drive millions more Americans, including many who currently have access to comprehensive coverage, into the ranks of the underinsured.

And why might that be?

The insurance industry is insistent on being able to retain what it calls “benefit design flexibility.” Those three words seem innocuous and reasonable, but if legislation that reaches the president grants insurers the flexibility they claim they must have, and requires all of us to buy coverage from them, millions more of us will have little alternative but to buy policies that appear to be affordable but which will be prove to be anything but affordable if we become seriously ill or injured.

As a consequence, these proposals would do little to increase affordable coverage for those currently insured, or stop the rise in medical bankruptcy. They would, however, ensure that a huge new stream of revenue–much of it from taxpayers who would finance the needed subsidies for people too poor to buy coverage on their own–would flow–”gush” might be a more appropriate word–to insurance companies. And much of that new revenue would ultimately go right into the pockets of the Wall Street investors who own them.

And what does he think of a Public Option?

Over the past several weeks, I have repeatedly told audiences around the country that the public option should not just be an “option” to be bargained away at the behest of insurance companies who are pouring money into Congress to defeat substantial and essential reforms. A public option must be created to provide true choice to consumers or reform will fail to truly fix the root of the severe problems that have been caused in large part by the greedy demands of Wall Street.

The Baucus plan, would create a government-subsidized monopoly for the purchase of bare-bones, high-deductible policies that would truly benefit Big Insurance. In other words, insurers would win; your constituents would lose.

Potter concludes:

It’s hard to imagine how insurance companies could write legislation that would benefit them more.

So, whether you agree with a public option or not, if the big prizes could actually go to those who know what they are talking about, saw that what they were doing was harmful to us and then speak out, Wendell Potter actually deserves some sort of gold star.