Insurance whistle-blower to speak at UI

Wendell Potter refers to the health insurance industry as “masters of deceit.”

It's not a slam from an outsider.

Potter, 58, of Philadelphia, was once one of them.

After a 20-year career in public relations that ended as chief corporate spokesman of CIGNA Corp., one of the nation's largest health insurers, Potter left last year.

“I told them I just didn't want to do it anymore,” he said in a phone interview with The Gazette.

At the time, he didn't plan on speaking out against the industry where he had honed a successful career.

But after seeing the insurance industry use the “same dirty tricks” to kill health care reform as it had in the 1990s, Potter said he changed his mind.

“I wasn't shocked to see it, but I was just mad,” he said of those tactics.

He testified last summer in front of a U.S. Senate committee, describing the methods he said the industry uses to confuse customers and dump the sick to satisfy investors.

“To help meet Wall Street's relentless profit expectations, insurers routinely dump policyholders who are less profitable or who get sick,” Potter testified.

He described policy rescission, in which companies see if a sick policyholder omitted a minor illness when applying for coverage and use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment.

Potter has appeared on CNN, ABC News, Bill Moyers Journal and in Time Magazine.

He will speak at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the University of Iowa, as part of the University Lecture Series.

Potter believes a public plan is essential for real reform but he said the insurance industry has spread misinformation and created fears to manipulate public opinion.

Public relations firms are hired to disseminate talking points to talk show hosts that end up on radio, television and opinion pages of newspapers, he said, and scare tactics are used with seniors who fear they will lose Medicare.

“This is intentional to get people to believe these lies and to get these people so upset that they go to these meetings and carry signs,” Potter said.

Still, he is hopeful that legislation will include a public option, which he sees as the only way to create a competitor that has influence in the marketplace.

“A public option would offer an alternative,” Potter said, “a balance to the greedy ways of the insurance industry.”