Following a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, Wendell left his position as head of communications for CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, to help socially responsible organizations — including those advocating for meaningful health care reform — achieve their goals.
In widely covered testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee in June of 2009, Wendell disclosed how the insurance industry has developed and implemented strategic communications plans, based on deceptive public relations, advertising and lobbying efforts, to defeat reform initiatives.
His new book, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans, is an expose of health insurers and a stark warning that corporate spin is distorting our democracy.
Wendell is currently a senior analyst at the The Center for Public Integrity. His website is WendellPotter.com, and his twitter account is @WendellPotter.
The Higher Health Insurers' Claim Denial Rate, the Higher the CEO Pay
When you're shopping for health insurance, wouldn't it be great if you could find out every insurer's claim denial rate? And how much each one spent on lobbying and advertising -- and how much they paid their CEO? You can now find all of that information and more if you ...
Don't Fall for TV Ads on Medicare From an Insurance Industry Front Group
Facing government cuts to one of their cash cows -- private Medicare plans -- health insurance companies have launched a multi-pronged campaign, financed by customer premiums, to persuade Congress to keep the cuts from going into effect next month. The industry's big PR and lobbying group, America's Health Insurance Plans, ...
Giving thanks for regulation of insurance industry greed
Although it’s a few days past Thanksgiving, I’m still feeling grateful, even to much maligned federal employees. Last week bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services did us a big favor by resisting pressure from insurance company executives. Those executives wanted to keep charging some of us more ...
The Usual Suspects Who Will Benefit From Gutting Obamacare Now Want You to Worry About 'Disruption'
Disruption. Get ready to hear that word many times in the coming weeks, especially if you hang out inside the Washington beltway. "Disruption" will be the new buzzword in an upcoming advertising campaign aimed at scaring us. The campaign is selling the idea that millions of Americans will face higher ...
Translating Insurance-Speak: What the industry says about Obamacare isn't really what it means
Health insurers invested a lot of what you paid them in premiums in an effort to get more of their friends elected to Congress. As the Center for Public Integrity reported last month, the political action committees of the 11 largest health insurers and their biggest trade group—America’s Health Insurance ...
Myths of the healthy uninsured
I understand where Mitt Romney was coming from when he said last week that Americans without health insurance don’t have to worry about dying at home. “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance,” the GOP presidential nominee told members of ...
Romney's phony answers to tough health care questions
During last week’s debate, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney once again pledged to repeal Obamacare, but he was light on details about what he would replace it with, other than to suggest that his administration would encourage states to come up with reform plans of their own. “What we did ...
Documentary captures what's wrong with U.S. health care
If you want to get a clearer understanding not only of why the U.S. health care system fails so many of us but, more importantly, how we can transform it to make it the best in the world, go to the movies this weekend. Regardless of your political affiliation or ...
Center series demonstrates dangers of 'captured' regulators
The months-long Center Public Integrity investigation into the Medicare program has uncovered a textbook example of the expensive consequences of what’s known as “regulatory capture.” Doctors and hospitals are likely being overpaid billions of dollars, which is hastening the depletion of the Medicare trust fund, because lawmakers and regulators put ...
Rather Not Go Bankrupt When You Get Sick? Another Reason to Support Obamacare
Politicians who are promising to repeal Obamacare won't find any evidence in the Kaiser Family Foundation's analysis of health insurance costs that the law has caused premiums to skyrocket, as many of those politicians have contended. On the contrary, premiums have increased on average only 4 percent over the past ...
What happened in Maine is a sobering reality check on the oft-repeated myth that getting rid of ObamaCare and other consumer protections is the answer to our health care problems. If the government will just get out of the way, the myth-makers would have us believe, the free market will ...
The illusory promise of free-market health care miracles
While listening to the promises to repeal ObamaCare during the Republican National Convention, I was reminded of what those of us in the health insurance industry said when our friends in Congress were able to block passage of President Clinton’s health care reform legislation 18 years ago. Like the politicians ...
Physicians' group will barnstorm conventions with truth-telling on ObamaCare
As the Republican convention gets underway today in Tampa, we can expect to hear the politicians and delegates gathered there — including GOP nominee Mitt Romney — rail against “Obamacare”, insisting that what we need instead of a “government takeover of health care” is “patient-centered” care, although what that would ...
Real-world health insurance math doesn't add up
Aetna’s had a lot to say lately about how business is good. The company disclosed last week that it made $458 million in profits this spring, and said it expected to make more money this year than executives previously thought possible. The firm also signaled it set aside three quarters ...
"Path to Prosperity?" For Many Senior Citizens, VP Pick Ryan's Plan Would Be Path to the Poorhouse
If Americans who are embracing Rep. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" -- and that now includes Mitt Romney -- spent a few minutes reviewing a few recent research reports, they just might conclude that the Wisconsin Republican's plan to reduce the deficit might better be renamed the "Path to the ...
The Cost of Care for Colorado’s Victims
One of the reasons Americans seem so willing to tolerate the fact that 50 million of us are uninsured and almost 30 million more of us are underinsured is that most of us who have coverage assume we are OK. That nothing truly catastrophic will happen to us, and that, ...
A nice little gift from ObamaCare directly to you
I’ve often said the U.S. health care system is so complex that trying to understand it makes your hair hurt. Case in point: the Affordable Care Act runs more than 2,000 pages. I’ll grant you that it’s a massive piece of legislation — but lawmakers felt that’s what was needed ...
Why insurers want ObamaCare's Medicaid business
The House of Representatives voted for the 33rd time last week to repeal ObamaCare, and for the 33rd time it was an exercise in futility. The Senate will ignore the House vote and allow the reform law to move forward, just as the Supreme Court did last month. House members ...
Health care's community-based beginnings
Back during the debate on the Clinton health care reform proposal, insurance executives tried to convince lawmakers that they were on the same side of health care reform as consumers were, so they embraced the idea of “community rating” in which insurers charge everyone in a given community the same ...
Translating the insurance industry's feel-good rhetoric
Health insurers avoided their worst case scenario last week — the prospect of the Supreme Court striking down the individual mandate but letting the rest of the health care law, especially profit-threatening consumer protections, go forward. Now the industry can focus on a goal it has had all along: getting ...
Flip-flop on health care reform casts President as modern-day Julius Caesar
Et tu, Ron? As President Obama read former Aetna CEO Ron Williams’ op-ed in The Wall Street Journal renouncing his support for a key provision of the health care reform law, he must have felt like Julius Caesar when Caesar realized, as he drew his last breath, that his close ...
UnitedHealth Group's misleading promises
Several years ago, when I was still a health insurance company PR guy, I was accused by a furious CNBC producer of withholding important information when I cajoled her into having my CEO on “Squawk Box” to talk about some new initiative we were rolling out. “You played us like ...
Insurance industry myths about the uninsured
In 2007, a few months before I left the health insurance industry, I was tasked to write a “white paper” designed to help convince media folks and politicians that the problem of the uninsured wasn’t much of a problem after all. If demographic data was sliced just so, I was ...
Guess who would benefit from privatizing Medicare?
If you think the idea of privatizing Medicare has gone away, that the health insurance industry has thrown in the towel on one of its biggest goals, there was fresh evidence last week that you would be wrong. As I wrote more than a year ago — when Rep. Paul ...
Could nonprofit health insurance plans be the real reformers?
When members of Congress who led the effort to overhaul the U.S. health care system saw the public option slipping away, some of them suggested that a viable alternative would be the fostering of nonprofit health insurance CO-OPs (Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans) throughout the country. I was among the ...
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April 23rd, 2013
The Higher Health Insurers' Claim Denial Rate, the Higher the CEO Pay
When you're shopping for health insurance, wouldn't it be great if you could find out every insurer's claim denial rate? And how much each one ...
March 12th, 2013
Don't Fall for TV Ads on Medicare From an Insurance Industry Front Group
Facing government cuts to one of their cash cows -- private Medicare plans -- health insurance companies have launched a multi-pronged campaign, financed by customer ...
November 26th, 2012
Giving thanks for regulation of insurance industry greed
Although it’s a few days past Thanksgiving, I’m still feeling grateful, even to much maligned federal employees. Last week bureaucrats at the Department of Health ...
November 19th, 2012
The Usual Suspects Who Will Benefit From Gutting Obamacare Now Want You to Worry About 'Disruption'
Disruption. Get ready to hear that word many times in the coming weeks, especially if you hang out inside the Washington beltway. "Disruption" will be ...
November 12th, 2012
Translating Insurance-Speak: What the industry says about Obamacare isn't really what it means
Health insurers invested a lot of what you paid them in premiums in an effort to get more of their friends elected to Congress. As ...
October 15th, 2012
Myths of the healthy uninsured
I understand where Mitt Romney was coming from when he said last week that Americans without health insurance don’t have to worry about dying at ...
October 10th, 2012
Romney's phony answers to tough health care questions
During last week’s debate, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney once again pledged to repeal Obamacare, but he was light on details about what he would ...
February 3rd, 2012
Paying For Cancer Treatment for Children in America With a Car Wash, Bake Sale and Fish Fry
"It shouldn't be this way," read the subject line of an email I received Friday morning from a conservative friend and fellow Southerner. "People shouldn't ...
March 13th, 2012
How We All Got Stuck Paying the Medical Bills of the Woman Who Sued to Kill Obamacare
If I were trying to persuade the Supreme Court later this month that Obamacare should not be declared unconstitutional, I would tell the story of ...
July 6th, 2011
One of my favorite bumper stickers reads, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." That's sort of how I feel about the health care ...
March 6th, 2012
Coming Soon: The End of Health Insurers As We Know Them -- By Self-Inflicted Wounds
Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini caused quite a stir when he said at a Las Vegas conference a few days ago that the insurance industry as ...
April 2nd, 2012
Hope the Supremes Strike Down ObamaCare? Get Ready for PanemCare
Since Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia clearly isn't going to take the time to actually read the health care reform law before he decides whether ...
June 15th, 2011
Health Insurers Pump Your Premiums Into a Financial Black Hole
Ever wonder what happens to the premiums you pay for your health insurance? You might be surprised to learn that more and more of the ...
July 7th, 2011
Death Panels Real and Imagined
On behalf of Grigor and Hilda Sarkisyan, I would like to invite Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia to attend the 21 st birthday celebration ...
'Dirty Wars' by Jeremy Scahill
Why have you started a comedy festival in northern Michigan in the middle of winter?
Because if you were here in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere (which is actually somewhere to us), you'd need a few laughs too ... Continue Reading
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Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow Show, 2/27/12
