The heath insurance industry is pulling out all the stops to defeat meaningful health care reform, despite public statements otherwise from industry officials. That was the message in Raleigh Tuesday from a man who should know, former high-ranking insurance company executive Wendell Potter, who appeared at a Crucial Conversations Luncheon sponsored by N.C. Policy Watch and the North Carolina Health Access Coalition.

Potter worked in corporate America for more than 20 years, eventually becoming head of corporate communications for Cigna, one of the largest for-profit insurance companies in America.  He was the company’s chief spokesperson and helped defeat health care reform in the early 1990s with misleading spin and talking points developed for the industry’s allies in Congress and for the front groups insurance companies funded to spread their message to the media and the public.

Potter says all that is happening again now in the industry’s efforts to defeat President Obama’s health care reform proposals.  The companies are playing the insider game again too he says, employing a battalion of well-connected lobbyists and contributing heavily to lawmakers’ campaigns.

Potter calls the most visible part of the insurance industry’s efforts a charm offensive, “a duplicitous and well-financed PR campaign”  to make sure reform serves what he calls the companies’ Wall Street masters far more than average Americans.

He minced no words describing the industry’s tactics to maximize profits by denying coverage, terminating policies of people who develop a serious illness, and pushing more and more Americans into high-deductible plans that require families to pay more and more of their own money for care.

Potter exploded on the national scene just a few months ago, testifying before Congress about what he says is the untrustworthy behavior of insurance companies that has only gotten worse since the 1993 reform efforts.  

He directly apologized for his role in helping shape and maintain a system that puts profits before people, denying millions affordable coverage to drive up stock prices and pay CEOs millions of dollars.

His change of heart came when he visited a free health clinic at a fairgrounds in Southwest Virginia, not far from where he grew up. Potter says thousands of people were waiting in the rain to see doctors who were using animal stalls as treatment rooms, people like the folks he grew up with.

The scene crystallized the doubts already growing in Potter’s mind about the industry he was paid to defend and he realized he couldn’t do it any more.  He has quickly become one of the most important advocates in the country for health care reform that reigns in obscene insurance industry profits and makes affordable care available to everyone.

Potter not only supports a strong public option, he says that without it the reform legislation might as well be called the “insurance company profit protection and enhancement act.”  But that’s what the industry and its allies seek, often using talking points Potter himself helped craft, like the claim that a public option would mean a “government takeover of health care.”

Potter says that’s absurd and an attempt to distract the public from the actual takeover of health care by Wall Street and greedy insurance companies. 

It’s an important and disturbing message, made especially powerful because Potter has been in the corporate offices where the takeover was hatched and the efforts to disguise it were developed. 

Now that he has seen the light, he’s trying to help the public and members of Congress see it too. Let’s hope their eyes are open.