Wendell Potter's Blog, page 32

Why Insurers Want ObamaCare’s Medicaid Business

Pay no attention to GOP governors; health insurers want that new 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 [...]

Healthcare Advocates: Time To Bury the Hatchet

Health insurance executives breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court upheld their favorite part of the Affordable Care Act (the part that is one of the least popular among the rest of us)—the individual mandate. And then, I’m confident, moments after they exhaled, they were on a conference call with their army of [...]

Health Care’s Community-Based Beginnings

For-profit health care is the norm today, but the system was born out of a more ‘community’-driven beginning. 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 [...]

Wendell Potter: A Prophetic Voice For Our Time

From Wisdom Voices, an interview with Wendell by Joanne Boyer, founder and editor of Wisdom Voices Press and blogger at WisdomVoices.com. There are few people today – in any walk of life – who have the courage and wisdom of Wendell Potter. Potter’s determined passion to help educate the American public and help them understand [...]

Translating the Insurance Industry’s Feel-Good Rhetoric

Focus group bromides obscure real intentions. 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: [...]

ObamaCare a Blessing for Millions of Real Americans

Supreme Court decision allows access to health insurance for many who have been denied. As I was waiting anxiously for today’s Supreme Court decision, I knew there was a man in Colorado I’d met on the first anniversary of the Affordable Care Act who was likely far more anxious than I was. I do not [...]

Flip-flop on Healh-Care Refrom 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 friend Brutus was in cahoots [...]

UnitedHealth Group’s Misleading Promises

Pledge to honor ObamaCare provisions even if Court strikes down law left much unsaid. 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 [...]

Insurance Industry Myths About the Uninsured

Insurers falsely claimed young people were uninsured by choice, don’t believe it. 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 [...]

Guess Who Would Benefit From Privatizing Medicare?

Insurers and their buddies want private profits at our expense, not real reform. 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 [...]