View From A Stall

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I first heard of Wendell Potter a couple of months back.  Hearing him tell his story, I could not imagine why he’d not be standing next to President Obama each and every time he spoke on health care.  Nicholas D. Kristof’s op-ed on Potter:

Opponents suggest that a “government takeover” of health care will be a milestone on the road to “socialized medicine,” and when he hears those terms, Wendell Potter cringes. He’s embarrassed that opponents are using a playbook that he helped devise.

“Over the years I helped craft this messaging and deliver it,” he noted.

Mr. Potter was an executive in the health insurance industry for nearly 20 years before his conscience got the better of him. He served as head of corporate communications for Humana and then for Cigna.

Potter’s conversion began with a screening of Michael Moore’s Sicko of which he found himself agreeing with much of it.  What took him completely over to the other side was an incident he witnessed while on a trip back home to Tennessee.

[He] dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock.

“It was a life-changing event to witness that,” he remembered. Increasingly, he found himself despising himself for helping block health reforms. “It sounds hokey, but I would look in the mirror and think, how did I get into this?”

On Potter’s former colleagues in the health insurance industry…

…they are removed from the consequences of their decisions, as he was, and are obsessed with sustaining the company’s stock price — which means paying fewer medical bills.

One way to do that is to deny requests for expensive procedures. A second is “rescission” — seizing upon a technicality to cancel the policy of someone who has been paying premiums and finally gets cancer or some other expensive disease. A Congressional investigation into rescission found that three insurers, including Blue Cross of California, used this technique to cancel more than 20,000 policies over five years, saving the companies $300 million in claims.

Mr. Potter notes that a third tactic is for insurers to raise premiums for a small business astronomically after an employee is found to have an illness that will be very expensive to treat. That forces the business to drop coverage for all its employees or go elsewhere.

This stuff is real.  Once we get passed talk of death panels and socialized medicine and the political games, there are still millions out there suffering daily at the hands of a health care system controlled in large part by the health insurance industry.  As Kristol writes,

As a nation, we’re at a turning point. Universal health coverage has been proposed for nearly a century in the United States. It was in an early draft of Social Security.

Yet each time, it has been defeated in part by fear-mongering industry lobbyists. That may happen this time as well — unless the Obama administration and Congress defeat these manipulative special interests. What’s un-American isn’t a greater government role in health care but an existing system in which Americans without insurance get health care, if at all, in livestock pens.

How does anyone opposing health care reform respond to this in a rational and fair-minded manner?   How do these same people sleep at night and what is it about their fellow Americans that they so despise that they’d turn a blind eye to the misery of so many?

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