Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans

The following is an excerpt from Wendell Potter's new book, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans (Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

The Beginning

“My name is Wendell Potter and for twenty 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 to the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on June 24, 2009. The committee’s chair, Senator Jay Rockefeller, D-W. Va., had asked me to testify as part of his investigation into health insurance company practices that for years had been swelling the ranks of the uninsured and the underinsured in the United States.

I explained how insurance companies 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 obtain—information needed by consumers. I described how for-profit insurance companies, in their constant quest to meet Wall Street’s profit expectations, routinely cancel the coverage of policy-holders who get sick, and how they “purge” small businesses when their employees’ medical claims exceed what underwriters expected.

I knew that as soon as I said those words my life would change forever. It did—but in ways I never could have imagined.

I had quit my job as head of public relations at CIGNA—a job that had paid me deep into six figures—because I could no longer serve in good conscience as a spokesman for an industry whose routine practices amount to a death sentence for thousands of Americans every year.

I did not intend to go public as a critic of the industry. But it gradually became clear to me that the industry’s duplicitous PR strategy was going to manipulate public opinion and likely shape health care reform in ways that would benefit insurance company executives and their Wall Street masters far more than most other Americans.

I was eventually compelled to pull back the curtain on the industry’s deception-based PR strategy, which comprised two active fronts. One was a highly visible “charm offensive” designed to create an image of the industry as an advocate of reform—and a good-faith partner with the president and Congress in achieving it. The second front was a secret, fearmongering campaign using front groups and business and political allies as shills to disseminate misinformation and lies, with the sole intent of killing any reform that might hinder profits.

I had left my job at CIGNA in May 2008, but it wasn’t until 10 months later that I realized I couldn’t stay on the sidelines. As it turned out, it would be a fellow Tennessean who gave me one of the final shoves off the sidelines and into the spotlight and the new role of whistle-blower, as many people have called me.

It was March 5, 2009, and I was channel surfing for some news about the health care reform summit that President Obama was holding at the White House that day. Of the 120 or so people at the summit, many were from special interests that had the largest stakes financially in a reformed health care system: doctors, hospitals, drug and medical- device manufacturers, and, of course, insurers. Knowing that these groups had played a lead role in killing Bill and Hillary Clinton’s reform plan 15 years earlier, Obama wanted to keep them from doing the same this time around. Having campaigned as someone who could bring people with diverse points of view together to work toward the common good, Obama had brought the top lobbyists of each special interest group to his kickoff reform “table”—which the Clintons had not done—and openly solicited the groups’ support and cooperation. To win their support, his administration would eventually cut side deals with some of them, most notably the drugmakers.