“The strategy is as it was in 1993 and '94, to ... demean and scare people about a government-run plan, try to make people not even remember that Medicare, their Medicare program, is a government-run plan that has operated a lot more efficiently.
“And also, the people who are enrolled in our Medicare plan like it better. The satisfaction ratings are higher in our Medicare program, a government-run program, than in private insurance.”
--Wendell Potter, former executive for CIGNA Healthcare
In an interview with Bill Moyers, Wendell Potter said the alternative to government-run insurance is Wall Street-run insurance. He described a corrupt system driven by profit margins and hedge fund investors, with little incentive to provide the healthcare their customers pay for.
Potter’s epiphany came when he went home to Tennessee and visited a nearby healthcare exposition in Virginia. He saw Americans waiting in line, being treated in animal stalls and on gurneys outdoors on wet pavement, people who’d driven from South Carolina, Kentucky and Georgia. Potter couldn’t believe this was happening in America.
He realized these people might be people he knew, people he’d grown up with. As he contemplated quitting a public relations career at CIGNA Healthcare he loved, was well-compensated for, and at no risk of losing, Potter read John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. There he found a quote from Dante’s Inferno: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.”
Potter quit.
One recent publicity effort by private health insurance corporations was to discredit Michael Moore’s film, “Sicko,” which Potter said hit the nail on the head.
In one scene from “Sicko,” Moore, having heard that al Qaida detainees at Guantanamo received better healthcare than American citizens, takes three boat loads of Americans--including 9/11 volunteers--who’ve been denied healthcare to Cuba. Turned away at Guantanomo, the Americans go to a hospital in Havana, where they're given immediate treatment, free of charge.
Cuba is considered a third world nation. What’s worse than third world healthcare, but fourth world healthcare? Americans are buying fourth world healthcare at first world prices.
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Sparking
John Jacob Di Gasbarro
GaryBaumgarten
Britomart
Dave Scriven
Gwendolyn Glover
Salon.com
Comments
I support universal healthcare. But I'm also a little scared about government-run healthcare because they don't do a good job with Medicare or Medicaid and they don't do a good job with public education. But, like public education, it should be a right for all Americans to have healthcare that actually takes care of them.
We the people need to make sure that our government creates a good, stable, understandable, and comprehensible healthcare program that everyone can choose to have. Other countries do it, so I believe we can too. It just won't be easy.
One thing Potter noted is that private insurance companies have repeatedly promised better coverage and then not followed through on them. I'd be open to the idea of forcing insurance companies out of trading on the stock market (as I think you suggested), thus promoting loyalty to customers rather than shareholders.
there is a lively chance that public medical programs will be hobbled by vested interests that the worst happens: high cost, poor care, and "i told you so" from the republicans. poor king obama.