You Couldn't Ask For a Better Source

Wendell Potter, the Senior Fellow on Health Care at the Center for Media and Democracy, recently appeared on the "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS to discuss, among other things, the scare tactics used by health care companies. With a twenty-year as a corporate public relations executive, Potter was the Director of Corporate Communications at CIGNA until he resigned last year to join the socially responsible Center for Media and Democracy. Potter's appearance with Bill Moyers was certainly timely, given the current debate regarding President Obama's health care plan. And after listening to Potter speak for almost an hour, I certainly understand why many individuals, including myself, feel that the health care system needs to be drastically reformed. If you have not done so already, I certainly encourage you to watch Michael Moore's documentary "SiCKO" to full appreciate the clips included in this interview but I have included some other quotes from Potter's appearance below:

• "I thought that [Michael Moore] hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned."
• "The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you're heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern."
• "In memos that would go back within the industry, [Moore] was never, by the way, mentioned by name in any memos because we didn't want to inadvertently write something that would wind up in his hands. So the memos would usually-- the subject line would be-- the e-mails would be "Hollywood". And as we would do the media training, we would always have someone refer to him as Hollywood entertainer or Hollywood moviemaker Michael Moore."
• "You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that, if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom."
• "I was watching MSNBC one afternoon. And I saw [Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN)]. He's just down the road from where I grew up, in Chattanooga. And he was talking-- he was asked a question about health care reform. I think it was just a day or two after the President's first health care reform summit. And he was one of the ones Republicans put on the tube.
  And he was saying that, you know, the health care problem is not necessarily as bad as we think. That of the uninsured people, half of them are that way because they want to 'go naked'."
• "The industry doesn't want to have any competitor. In fact, over the course of the last few years, has been shrinking the number of competitors through a lot of acquisitions and mergers. So, first of all, they don't want any more competition, period. They certainly don't want it from a government plan that might be operating more efficiently than they are, that they operate. The Medicare program that we have here is a government run program that has administrative expenses that are like three percent or so...[The health care companies] spend about 20 cents of every premium dollar on overhead, which is administrative expense or profit. So they don't want to compete against a more efficient competitor."
• "Back in the early '90s, or back during the time that the Clinton plan was being debated, ninety-five cents out of every dollar was sent, you know, on average was used by the insurance companies to pay claims. Last year, it was down to just slightly above eighty percent. So investors want that to keep shrinking."
• "A big chunk of [a health care premium] goes into shareholders' pockets. It's returned to them as part of the investment to them. It goes into the exorbitant salaries that a lot of the executives make. It goes into paying sales, marketing and underwriting expenses. So a lot of it goes to pay those kinds of administrative functions -- overhead."
• "The people who are enrolled in our Medicare plan like it better. The satisfaction ratings are higher in our Medicare program, a government run program, than in private insurance."