Health insurance exec becomes hostile witness

Jun. 25th, 2009 by Scott Hensley
Filed under: Health care reform, Hot Health Headline

You know your industry is in a real jam with Congress when the nosy legislators call an ex-spinmeister to testify about how his old employers give consumers the shaft.

Enter Wendell Potter, until last year the top PR guy at Cigna, one of the nation’s largest health insurers. Potter, now an activist on health issues, testified before a Senate committee about how “a cartel of large for-profit insurers” that dominates health care deliberately confuses customers and dumps the sick and unprofitable ones. (Read his prepared testimony here.)

Wendell Potter
Photo: Center for Media and Democracy

Potter told the Philadelphia Inquirer, that he has no “ax to grind with Cigna.” His beef is bigger: “It’s the system. Cigna is part of a system that is not functional, that does not serve the needs of the American people.”

If you’re interested in Potter’s conversion to insurance critic, check out his blog, where he describes his “road to Damascus,” a stretch of highway in rural Virginia. A few years back, he saw hundreds of people flocking there for free medical and dental care from a group that got its start aiding remote villages in South America.

Cigna disputed Potter’s charges, saying in a statement to The Wall Street Journal Health Blog, “…we strongly disagree with the suggestion that, motivated by profits, the insurance industry has deliberately attempted to confuse or unfairly treat covered individuals.”

Trudy Lieberman, president of AHCJ’s board of directors, interviewed Potter for her “Excluded Voices” series in the Columbia Journalism Review. The interview provides a window into how insurance companies control the message and what questions reporters should ask, but don’t. Potter make some predictions about how insurers will react as health reform moves forward and how they will mount “duplicitous PR campaigns.”