Wendell Potter is the former CIGNA health insurance executive who is now Senior Fellow on Health Care with the Center for Media and Democracy. He is blowing the whistle on his former industry's lobby and PR tactics and was interviewed July 16, 2009 for forty-five minutes by Amy Goodman of the radio and TV program Democracy Now! The entire interview can be viewed online. Here is a snippet:
AMY GOODMAN: What is the game plan of the health insurance industry?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, the game plan is based on scare tactics. And, of course, the thing they fear most is that the country will at some point gravitate toward a single-payer plan. That's the ultimate fear that they have. But they know that right now that is not something that's on the legislative table. And they've been very successful in making sure that it isn't. They fear even the public insurance option that's being proposed, that was part of President Obama's campaign platform, his healthcare platform. And they'll pull out all the stops they can to defeat that. And they'll be working with their ideological allies, with the business community, with conservative pundits and editorial writers, to try to scare people into thinking that embracing a public health insurance option would lead us down the slippery slope toward socialism and that you will be, in essence, putting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor. That is—you know, they've used those talking points for years, and in years past they've always worked.
