Deadly Spin Read Free

forced to buy insurance they could not afford. The insurance industry and many members of Congress persuaded President Obama to change his mind. As a result, insurers will get billions of dollars in new revenues from people required by law to buy their products and billions more from the government to subsidize premiums for people who can’t afford them. Because of the way the legislation came together on Capitol Hill, the complex bill that reached the president’s desk would not really work without the so-called individual mandate.
    While there are several new regulations that insurers will have to abide by—or seek to weaken or overturn in the months and years ahead—they got much of what they wanted and were able to eliminate most of what they didn’t like.
    Despite the insurance industry’s successes and my disappointments with the final bill, I did not join the many progressives who were following the Republican lead in urging Congress to scrap it and start over.
    My support of the bill led a few on the far left to call me a “corporatist” and a double agent for the insurance industry. I hope this book will explain—by putting the recent debate in historical perspective and by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how the advocates for reform were often out-maneuvered and out-“messaged”—why scrapping the bill, despite its flaws, would have been the worst thing Congress could have done. Had the legislation failed, the industry and its political allies would have been further emboldened, and neither Congress nor any future president would have taken the political risk of attempting meaningful reform for years, as was the case after the Clinton plan failed. The perception of health care reform as the untouchable “third rail of American politics” would have been solidified.
    This book will also explain why the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is only the first halting step in the direction we need to keep moving in to make the U.S. health care system better, in terms of quality of care, cost efficiency, and equitability. It will detail some of the serious problems that lawmakers must tackle next—and soon. It will describe the disturbing trends in health insurance—which the new law only partially addresses—that are pushing more Americans into the ranks of the under insured. It will explain how a law enacted almost thirty years ago to protect employee pension benefits has made it nearly impossible for 130 million Americans now enrolled in employer-sponsored health insurance plans to seek relief from the courts when their insurance companies deny coverage—and why many of the provisions of the new law will not apply to them. It will also chronicle the ascendancy of corporate PR in general at a time when the mainstream media is in decline and the Supreme Court has given corporations the freedom they have long sought to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections and, as a result, public policy.
    Finally, this book will describe what the latter trends mean not only for our health care system but also for our democracy and way of life—and explain why we will continue down a fast track to losing both unless we start paying attention to these trends.
    In conclusion, I will suggest ways we can fight back.
    For I believe that unless we do fight back—and with urgency—the twenty-first century will be dominated by the retrenchment of democracy and the unbridled growth of corporate power, enabled by increasingly unchallenged propaganda.

C H A P T E R   I

    The Beginning

    M Y name is Wendell Potter and for twenty years, I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies, and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
    That is how I introduced myself to the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on June 24, 2009. The committee’s chair, Senator Jay