"Wendell Potter"

Thom Dunn / 4:00 am Sat, Jan 18, 2020

Healthcare choice in America is a scam, according to the people who came up with it

One of the most frustratingly incredible things about Corporate PR Con Artistry is that even when the chaos magicians behind it reveal their tricks, there are still people who will continue to insist that somehow, this makes the lie even more real. We've seen it before with climate change, and the bullshit connection between vaccines and autism. […]
Cory Doctorow / 11:59 am Wed, Dec 18, 2019

From Enron to Saudi Arabia, from Rikers Island to ICE's gulag, how McKinsey serves as "Capitalism's Consigliere"

On this week's Intercepted podcast (MP3) (previously), host Jeremy Scahill (previously) takes a long, deep look at the history of McKinsey and Company, whose consultants are the architects of ICE's gulags, a failed, high-cost initiative to curb violence at Rikers Island that used falsified data to secure ongoing funding — a company whose internal documents […]
Cory Doctorow / 12:49 pm Tue, Aug 6, 2019

The only thing health insurance companies are good at is scaring us about socialized medicine

In a new column in the LA Times, business columnist Michael Hiltzik makes the argument that the only thing health insurers have done with any effectiveness is scare us into thinking that the socialized medicine services that every other advanced country has will not work in America.
Cory Doctorow / 11:04 am Wed, Sep 20, 2017

America's execs increasingly believe health insurance industry is worse than useless

It's not just Warren Buffett and his Republican lieutenant Charlie Munger who favor single payer and view the US health insurance industry as a drag on national competitiveness and a needless expense on the bottom line: it's also companies like Walmart, Boeing, and GE, who have stopped paying insurers, buying services for their employees directly […]
Xeni Jardin / 10:05 am Mon, Oct 15, 2012

On Romney, health care in America, and dying in your apartment

Recently, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney told members of the Columbus Dispatch editorial board, "We don't have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don't have insurance. We don't have a setting across this country where if you don't have insurance, we just say to you, 'Tough luck, you're going to […]
Cory Doctorow / 5:08 am Sun, Jul 12, 2009

High-ranking insurance PR flack defects, explains dirty tricks used to fight universal healthcare

Ross sez, "A high-placed insider (ex VP of PR at Cigna) describes the machinations the insurance industry has used to keep us from getting a decent health care system." This guy literally wrote the talking-points memo that the anti-universal-health-care crowd uses. He had a conversion experience and has now come clean. Remarkable. BILL MOYERS: Was […]
Cory Doctorow / 10:25 pm Wed, Jun 24, 2009

Health insurance versus health

Ezra Klein's Washington Post column quotes from the Congressional testimony of Wendell Potter, a 20-year exec at Cigna, explaining how the health insurance industry's business model is incompatible with health itself: The industry, Potter says, is driven by "two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now […]