More of Wendell Potter's remarks

My name is Wendell Potter and for 20 years, I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies, and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick – all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.   

That is how I introduced myself when I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in late June about the dishonesty of the insurance industry. I described 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 they did 15 years ago when the insurance industry 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 months 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. I know from having served on numerous trade group committees and industry-funded front groups, however, that industry leaders are always full partners in developing strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with insurers’ ability to increase profits. 

My involvement in these groups goes back to the early ‘90s when insurers joined with other special interests to finance the activities of 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 billed as a broad-based business coalition that was led by the National Federation of Independent Business and included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Health Benefits Coalition in reality got the lion’s share of its funding and guidance from the big insurance companies and their trade associations.  

Like most front groups, the Health Benefits Coalition was set up and run out of one of Washington’s biggest PR firms. Porter-Novelli provided all the staff work for the Coalition while an executive with the NFIB, which has long been a close ally of the insurance industry, served as a frontman.