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

DEADLY SPIN

AN INSURANCE COMPANY INSIDER
SPEAKS OUT ON HOW CORPORATE
PR IS KILLING HEALTH CARE AND
DECEIVING AMERICANS

Wendell Potter

For Blaine and Pearl Potter. Thank you for
the many sacrifices you made for me and for leading
by example. Im blessed to be your son.

For Alex and Emily. Thank you for putting up with an
often distant and cranky father while I was trying to find the
courage to do what I felt in my heart was the right thing.

And, especially, for Lou. Thank you for your patience and
steadfast support, for being the worlds best mom and for
putting up with me, not only during my crisis of conscience
but since the day we met. Youre the love of my life.

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

When my old friend and colleague Wendell Potter contacted me in 2008, it was the first time Id heard from him in years. He told me hed quit his job as head of corporate communications at the health insurer CIGNA and was trying to decide what to do next. I remember asking him what had happened at CIGNA to make him leave, and he said it was a long story but that hed tell me sometime. The short version, he said then, was that he had decided to come back to the real world.

In many ways, Ive learned subsequently, it was Wendell who had been living in the real worldwhere corporate greed and human indifference are the daily norm. It was the rest of us, including me, who were living the fantasy, thinking that Americas free-market system could provide actual health care for its people through a for-profit structure.

Ive known Wendell since the late spring of 1973, when he came to the old Memphis Press-Scimitar as a summer intern after graduating from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I was the rewrite man and an assistant city editor at the now defunct afternoon daily, which meant I was the one who handled the rough copy that came from reporters and interns, frequently with deadlines staring us in the face. Wendell made his mark quickly.

He knew the right questions to ask, and he knew how to get the answers and put them into words. His copy may have needed a little tweaking from time to time, but he was a quick learner, even thanking me for some of the changes I made. (How rare is that?) Everyone on the city desk quickly knew we had a keeper, and Wendell rose rapidly through the journalistic ranks at Scripps Howard in the next few yearseventually winding up as the youngest reporter the chain ever assigned to cover Washington, D.C., politics.

As Wendell and I chatted in the months after reconnecting in 2008, it became evident that he had an even bigger story to tell. We even talked about him writing a book, but he was still unsure about what he would do next, actually reveling in the first taste of anonymity hed experienced in decades.

But things changed. Health care reform became front-page news. Wendell recognized that the PR barrage unleashed by his former industry was skewing the debate on this vital issue. He decided to speak out, regardless of the consequences. The result was months of public appearancesin person, on TV, and in congressional hearingsand now hes finally written that book. Youre holding it.

Deadly Spin is a revelation about Americas health care system unlike anything else youve seen. There are a lot of books and articles about health care reform, but none of them provide the insiders perspective like this one.

As an old newshound, Im a little cynical about anything I read. And you should be, too. I ask myself, whos telling me this and why? To me, the chapters that follow are the work of a first-rate investigative reporter who spent twenty years on his undercover assignment. No one actually gave him the assignment, and he wasnt even aware he was on oneuntil the events occurred that he outlines for us in the book. But once a journalist, always a journalist.

Were fortunate to have Wendell Potter back on the beat.

Barney DuBois

Memphis, Tennessee

July 2010

The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments
of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of
corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means
of protecting corporate power against democracy.

ALEX CAREY

You have our commitment to play, to contribute, and to help pass
health care reform this year.

I am partly responsible for some of the deaths making up that shameful statistic.

As a senior public relations executive, or spinmeister, for two decades with two of the largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United StatesHumana and CIGNAit was my job to enhance those firms reputations. But as one of the industrys top public relations executives and media spokesmen, I also helped create and perpetuate myths that had no other purpose but to sustain those companies extraordinarily high profitability.

For example, if you are among those who believe that the United States has the best health care system in the world despite overwhelming evidence to the contraryits because my fellow spinmeisters and I succeeded brilliantly at what we were paid very well to do with your premium dollars. In fact, the United States ranks 47th in life expectancy at birth, behind Bosnia, and 54th, behind Bangladesh, in fairness, a measure of the extent to which the best care is available equally throughout a country.

And if you were persuaded that the health care reform bill President Barack Obama signed into law in March 2010 was a government takeover of the health care system, my former colleagues and I earned every penny of our handsome salaries. Not to mention our bonuses.

From the first day of the Clinton administration in 1993 until shortly before the election of Obama, I was a behind-the-scenes leader in every industry effort to kill any reform legislation that threatened insurance company profits. Although I told people during that period that I never lied to a reporter, the reality is that I often didbut in such subtle ways that I could never even acknowledge to myself that I was purposely trying to mislead. At the time, I was unaware that I was feeding the media and the public false information, and so caught up in the industrys swirling spin machine that I was oblivious to it.

Had it not been for a series of events that occurred in 2007events that, as someone raised as a Southern Baptist, I cant help believing were part of some kind of divine interventionI would probably still be spinning for health insurers.

In retrospect, it seems as if it were predestined that I would become either a witness to or a participant in those events, which would reveal to me just how corrupt and deadly the American health insurance industry had become, and also how far I had strayed from my own moral path. By the end of 2007, it was inevitable that I would leave my job and begin speaking out against what I consider now to be an evil system built and sustained on greed.