Wendell Potter, the former head of corporate communications for Cigna, became a healthcare-reform celebrity in June after his testimony before a congressional committee about what he viewed as the American health-insurance industry’s “duplicitous” behavior in the current health-reform debate, outlining specific techniques insurers employ to “dump the sick” and protect stock price at all costs.
Since then, Barack Obama has held him up as an authority on insurance-company greed.
Potter’s recent remarks delivered at the Center for American Progress are a good summary of his insider views on how American insurance companies have systematically used PR activities to further the narrow interests of the industry:
My involvement [in numerous trade group committees and industry-funded front groups] goes back to the early ‘90s when insurers joined with other special interests to finance the activities of the Healthcare Leadership Council, which led a coordinated effort to scare Americans and members of Congress away from the Clinton plan.
A few years after that victory, the insurers formed a front group called the Health Benefits Coalition to kill efforts to pass a Patients Bill of Rights… the Health Benefits Coalition was set up and run out of one of Washington’s biggest PR firms. The PR firm provided all the staff work for the Coalition while an executive with the NFIB, which has long been a close ally of the insurance industry, served as a front man.
One of the key strategies of the Health Benefits Coalition… in late 1998 was to stir up support among conservative talk radio and other media… the message was that President Clinton owed a debt to the liberal base of the “Democrat” Party and would try to pay back that debt by advancing the type of big government agenda on health care that he failed to get in 1994. The tactics worked. Industry allies in Congress made sure the Patients’ Bill of Rights would not become law.
The insurance industry called on [a powerful Washington-based PR firm] in 2007 to help blunt the impact of Michael Moore’s movie, Sicko. The PR firm created and staffed a front group called Health Care America specifically to discredit Moore and to demonize the health care systems featured in the movie…
The PR firm also activated conservative allies and enlisted the support of conservative talk show hosts, writers and editorial page editors to warn against a “government-takeover” of the U.S. care system. That is a term the industry uses often to scare people away from any additional involvement of the government in health care…
The PR firm’s work on behalf of the industry included feeding talking points to conservatives in the media and in Congress and placing columns and op-eds written for the industry’s friends in conservative and free-market think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage, CATO, the Manhattan Institute and the Galen Institute.
With this history, you can rest assured that the insurance industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR practices it has used for many years, to kill reform this year…
Having recently stepped out of the PR-Matrix myself, it feels great to see someone as Potter do the same. Hopefully he will be able to make a huge difference in the lives of millions of Americans at the mercy of several of the world’s most powerful corporations.
But it was Potter’s opening during his remarks at the Center for American Progress that hit the strongest chord in me: “Much has been said and written about the millions of dollars the special interests are spending on lobbying activities … to shape health care reform legislation. Very little by comparison has been written about the millions of dollars that special interests are spending on PR activities to accomplish the same goal and that are vital to successful lobbying efforts.”
I actually am of the opinion that the mainstream media doesn’t provide a thorough coverage of the overall, venomous influence that PR has in the world — of which its influence on lobbying efforts is only a fraction of.
And that’s how Wendell Potter has become my inspiration to launch a fight for a world where bullshit — used in the same spirit as my friend Paul Tulipana at BlogLess – is a bit less of a pervasive influence.
So stay tuned for upcoming posts denouncing misleading PR activities, as well as reflecting on other social phenomena and elements of human nature that tend to strengthen the grip of bullshit on us… and what we can or cannot do about it.
