Join NurseTalk and hear Wendell Potter, one-time health insurance industry insider, speak of the epiphany that transformed his life.
He vividly describes a scene he witnessed at a county fairgrounds where uninsured Americans were lined up “by the hundreds” to be treated in “barns and animal stalls” by volunteer doctors, nurses and dentists.
As he watched, he realized that as Vice President of Communications for CIGNA Insurance, “I was working to support a broken, very dysfunctional healthcare system, I was paid to present a world that wasn’t real. . . to spread propaganda about how the health insurance system works or to scare people away from any alternatives to the multi-payer system that we had.”
He wrote about the disinformation campaigns of the health insurance industry in his book Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.
Potter also testified before the US Congress on the topic of health insurance companies and their focus on making profits, rather than on meeting people’s needs.
Yet Potter has a deeper story to tell about how in the United States, “power is tied to money.” In fact, he co-authored a book (with Nick Penniman) on this issue called Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It. This must-read book clearly explains how political power became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthy and it’s impact on our public policies.
To get this critical story out, Potter founded Tarbell, a nonprofit, independent reader-funded news organization that explains “how moneyed interests touch the lives of average Americans.” Ida Tarbell invented investigative journalism when she researched and wrote History of the Standard Oil Company, shining a light on the ruthless tactics used by Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller as they established an oil monopoly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Learn more about Wendell Potter’s work and his commitment to hard-hitting, solutions journalism that “holds the big guys” accountable.