Whistleblower: Insurance Industry Doesn't Want Affordable Care Act Repealed Wants Democrats Defeated

[Omaha Steve]

Source: Workers Independent News

By Doug Cunningham

Wendell Potter spent 20 years as top executive with CIGNA. He wrote “Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans”. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act - with a decision expected in June - the insurance industry whistleblower says the industry’s real goal is not to repeal the law, but to defeat Democrats in November.

[Wendell Potter]: “They don’t want the bill - quite honestly - to be overturned or repealed. They want the bill to go forward with the individual mandate intact. But what they want to do is to get people to vote out the Democrats who voted for the bill so that they’ll have more friends in Congress to strip out the consumer protections.”

Potter says for-profit health insurers are killing health health care and their unsustainable system will implode within a few years. That’s the view he got from the CIGNA corporate ladder.

[Potter 2]: “The higher up that ladder I climbed the more I could see what these companies do to meet Wall Street’s profit expectations. And most of the big insurance companies are now for-profit companies. They cancel people’s health insurance when they get sick. They refuse to sell coverage to people who need coverage. They price policies so high that small businesses can no longer afford care. They are spending less and less of our premium dollars on our health care and more and more to reward shareholders and senior executives.”

FULL title: Whistleblower: Insurance Industry Doesn't Want Affordable Care Act Repealed, It Wants Democrats Defeated- 03/29/12



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[Liberal_Stalwart71]

1. Wendell Potter has really been the lone hero in all of this, thanks to Bill Moyers

and Mike Moore who introduced him to the world.

Passing along...

[CAPHAVOC]

2. Their biggest fear

Medicare for all. They are terrified of it. So is the GOP. And a lot of elected Democrats who are on the payroll.

[Dragonfli]

11. "elected Democrats are on the payroll" how else, why else would Democrats

Pass a law crafted by the Heritage foundation that they have tried to pass since the eighties?
It took a Democrat to pass their dream legislation and it will take a Democrat to Nuke Medicare (just like Clinton nuked welfare)

Perhaps I am jaded and cynical, but these things tend to go as I predict, even if I am cynical.

[CAPHAVOC]

17. No doubt.

The Tax Code is the source of the problem. All deductions should be eliminated and a progressive tax rate collected. But that would put K Street Lobbyists out of business and give the power back to the people. Can't have that. It is a truly Bi-Partisan Corruption.

[loudsue]

25. And it took Clinton to pass NAFTA.

That is why there is NO QUESTION that the democratic party, starting in Reagan's time, has been completely infiltrated by republicans.

Anyone who is not familiar with the Powell Manifesto needs to become familiar with that. The Powell Manifesto and PNAC (Project for a New American Century) are the two fascist wet dreams that the darkest forces of the world have been putting together for quite a while.

ALL of this shit has been carefully planned and laid out for everyone to see. Getting corporate money free-flowing in elections has just been the latest victory for these dark lords.

[Kaleko]

42. Thank you for spelling that one out.

Thanks also to the posters above.

[Lifelong Protester]

3. Yep, well, tell the insurance companies

that if they want the 'Democrats out' they should use their muscle to get the Repubs out of women's 'business', if you know what I mean.

Sorry, Repubs, but you might want to look at that mob of angry women coming your way...or wait, just ignore us until we have overtaken you...

[abelenkpe]

8. The war on women

Is an attack on HCR in that they were looking for excuses to deny coverage. Im sure that the insurance industry is behind those efforts hand in hand with religious nut cases.

[siligut]

4. The term "Whistleblower" should be changed to "Conscientious" or "Principled".

Anything word that means doing the humane and correct thing, not a word that means sounding the alarm. Using "whistleblower" to describe a person who exposes deceit and subterfuge lets the deceit and subterfuge seem like the norm. While it may be, if we want a better world, those who are complicit should not be allowed to feel comfortable doing it.

I applaud Wendell Potter, the financial rewards for going along are great, it takes something special to risk giving all that up.

[Dragonfli]

12. I second that /nt

[progressoid]

5. Not according to DUers with inside information.

The insurance industry hates it!

k/r

[obxhead]

33. Surprisingly they are absent from this thread.

[eridani]

37. They are half right

They hate the consumer protections, but love the mandate.

[hayrow1]

6. Mr. Potter's position seems on target

The for-profit insurance industry has been given years of continued successful existence by the Obama healthcare plan. The regulations will, as I understand things, insure the companies profitability with very little government interference or regulation. The current system is not in the long term interest of the industry, and the single payer option would be a huge problem for the industry.

[abelenkpe]

7. My republican father

Has worked in the insurance industry since retiring from the navy. He also says without the mandate insurance companies will go bankrupt fast.
He also says that the only true way to get costs down is single payer.

[Kablooie]

24. Without the mandate but keeping the rest of the act, it's true.

But SCOTUS proposed killing the whole thing and going back to exactly the way we were before.
That won't bankrupt them any more than it used to.

[abelenkpe]

29. Possibly

But keep in mind that the financial crisis hit insurance companies hard too. They've been wobbly for many years. they needed the mandate. It was a bailout of sorts for them.

[groundloop]

9. Affordable Care Act, WITHOUT consumer protections, would be a disaster

As it stands now the Affordable Care Act is more or less tolerable so long as the strong consumer protections stay in place. If the repukes were to get their way and strip consumer protections from the bill it would be an absolute disaster (and a huge windfall to the insurance industry).

[southernyankeebelle]

10. Like Carville said if this is repealled the republicans will own the health care. I

dunno if this will defeat democrats like they think especially with the women being so pissed off with them wanting to impose their religious beliefs on us. The republicans are doing all they can to make Obama a one term president. If Obama wins reelection this man will have earned it. I hope he can win reelection and I think he will do good things in his next term.

[xtraxritical]

41. VOTE A STRAIGHT DEMOCRATIC BALLOT be happy and sane again!

[southernyankeebelle]

45. Great idea

[Iliyah]

13. Well if the 5 conservatives do strike the

manadate this indeed will open the door to single payer or medicare, medi-cal, medicaid for all, and if that happens the insurance industry will loose a hell of a lot of money and will eventually fold and y'know that money and power is the only factor that corporations are concered about, and yes, they could care less about the American people. Just listen to Mittens.

[groundloop]

14. I'm not so sure that the defeat of Affordable Care Act opens door to anything....

I can't imagine Congress having the stomach for another fight over healthcare anytime soon. Also, we (Democrats) would need about 65 Senators to ensure getting single payer through the Senate (we certainly couldn't do it with 61). All that would come out of this law being struck down is several more decades of rising healthcare cost, more insurance industry corruption, and more Americans losing their homes and going into bankruptcy.

[nobodyspecial]

16. Don't inject reality

into this fantasy of Medicare for all within the next four years. It's magical thinking to believe that defeating this measure will lead to something better.

The ACA was not the bill we needed but the one we could get -- and it provides an instrumental stepping stone for single payer. Once people see improvements, the GOP cannot dominate the issue with fear mongering. All of our key social programs started out on a smaller scale.

[Uncle Joe]

22. Reality is if the mandate is approved by the SC, it will become far more difficult to ever get

universal single payer coverage, Medicare for all or anything approaching that because the for profit "health" insurance industry with a massive captive clientele will have a firmer grip on Congress via lobbying and bribe money than it does now.

[AndyTiedye]

35. How can it get any more difficult?

if the mandate is approved by the SC, it will become far more difficult to ever get universal single payer coverage

How can it get any more difficult than impossible?

[Uncle Joe]

39. It's been an uphill fight but it isn't and never was impossible, all that happened before occurred

without the for profit "health" insurance industry being nationaly institutionalized and given tens of millions of captured customers. Why on earth would anyone believe having obtained even greater power and wealth, they won't have a firmer grip on future Congresses than they have up until now?

This mandate will only serve to have the American People forced to subsidize the for profit "health" insurance industry's lobbying and bribing money only to be used to work against the peoples' best interests.

[A Simple Game]

18. Why is the door closed now?

I thought we had to pass the bill so we could fix it later. Two years is later, isn't it?

[Occulus]

20. Have you noticed that the "fix it later" refrain is silent now that they may be forced into it?

I certainly have. I've noticed a marked lack of enthusiasm among DU's most ardent ACA supporters regarding this chance to prove they meant what they said when they were all shrieking "pass it now and fix it later". And you're right, it's 'later', and the SCOTUS may have a problem with the ACA. Where are DU's most active and vocal ACA supporters? Why aren't they proposing the 'future fixes' with which they all shouted down the ACA's critics?

We all knew they weren't actually serious about that, but it's nice to have some confirmation on occasion.

[kenfrequed]

26. Yup

I noted this as well. The tone was oh-so-similar to those that lingered here and opposed impeaching Cheney/Bush and promised that "we can pursue them legally after the elections." Cowardly bullsh!t.

[AndyTiedye]

36. "Fix It Later" Was a Casualty of the 2010 Elections

We don't have the votes to do anything in the House anymore, in case you hadn't noticed.

[mother earth]

15. I agree...despite their best shots, they will fail. It will come back to bite them. Inevitable. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. But, to be clear, Potter supports the Act, and doesn't want it repealed

Maybe, then, supporters of the law should co-opt the "hands off" slogan and make it their own. That would require adding just a few more words here and there to make clear what would be lost if the law is repealed, gutted or declared unconstitutional.
...
The Affordable Care Act is closing the despised and even deadly "doughnut hole" in the Medicare prescription drug program, which was designed in 2003 largely by lobbyists for insurance and pharmaceutical companies who were more interested in protecting their companies' profits than helping seniors stay alive. The way the law was cobbled together, Medicare beneficiaries get prescription drug coverage only up to a certain amount. When they reach that limit, they fall into the "doughnut hole" and have to pay about $4,000 out of their own pockets for their prescriptions before coverage resumes. As a consequence, many people stop taking their medications because they don't have the money to pay for them. And many of them die. The Affordable Care Act has already shrunk that gap and will close it completely in 2020.
...
To avoid paying claims, insurers for years have cancelled the coverage of policyholders when they got sick. A former nurse in Texas testified before Congress in 2009 about getting a cancellation notice from her insurer the day before she was to have a mastectomy because she had failed to note on her application for coverage that she had been treated for acne. The Affordable Care Act makes it illegal for insurers to cancel policies for any reason other than fraud or failure to pay premiums.

"Hands off my health care!" Maybe we ought to think that through a little bit more before we take to the streets with those words on our placards. Insurers who profited from the way things used to be will laugh all the way to the bank if you start waving those signs, but you and people you love might live to regret it. On the plus side, at least for the special interests, you probably won't live as long.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/hands-off-my-health-care_b_1379467.html

[Uncle Joe]

21. Why would the for profit "health" insurance industry want it killed, the mandate institutionalizes

their for profit industry and guarantees them a captive clientele.

If they're spending money against the law it's because they're playing Br'er Rabbit, "please don't throw us into the thorn patch!"

Thanks for the thread, Omaha Steve.

[kenfrequed]

27. Well...

Many of them would prefer the whole thing be scrapped. The don't want any of the meager consumer protections even if it does come with a mandated insurance system. You see they are all individual greedy little bastards who look at their own expense sheets. They know that cutting the protections will definitely increase their bottom line and they have numbers that indicate this. They have to stack this up against potential consumers who will start buying their insurance. Certain money over potential consumers.

[Uncle Joe]

28. I believe

they're smart enough to recognize two essential truths.

1. The mandate is the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs and 2. the federal government seems to be loath about preventing mergers of mega corporations from taking place anymore.

As the for profit "health" insurance industry's Golden Eggs accumulate from their captured clientele allowing their financial/power grip on future Congresses to become tighter, they will form ever greater monopolies and consumers won't have real choice as protections are stripped over time.

Even today it doesn't take too much in the way of collusion for them to work in tandem as the number of major insurance corps. are limited and I expect that number to decrease even more.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/02/18/health-insurer-profits-jumped-250-in-last-decade/

"Profits for the 10 largest U.S. insurance companies jumped 250% between 2000 and 2009 while millions of Americans have lost coverage, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The report found that the five biggest insurance companies -- WellPoint (WLP), Cigna (CI), UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Aetna (AET) and Humana (HUM) -- saw their profits increase 56% in 2009, a year in which 2.7 million people lost their private coverage.What's more, the report found that the companies combined earned a total of $12.2 billion last year. And lest we forget, on the executive compensation, CEOs of the top five received $24 million on average in 2008, the report said."

[HiPointDem]

30. Insurance biz is already concentrated enough to be considered an oligopoly.

In Hawaii 2 firms control 98% of the market. In California, the state with the most competition, two firms control almost half the market. In the US as a whole, 2/3 of the commercial market is covered by 12 plans.

That's from memory so it may not be precise, but close enough to get the idea.

There is no "competition".

[rocktivity]

23. Candidate for this year's "You Call This NEWS?" Award

Last edited Sun Dec 9, 2012, 01:51 PM - Edit history (2)

I most certainly did NOT need ANYONE, let alone a "whistleblower," to tell me THAT, LOL


rocktivity

[tularetom]

31. The insurance industry wants the mandate but not the pre existing condition requirement

Nor do they want to keep young people on their parents policy as long as Obamacare would permit. What they are hoping for is to keep the mandate, get a bunch of republicans elected to congress and have them remove all these requirements from the act.

With a mandate that requires everybody to have insurance they are free to raise premiums as much as they see fit. Of course as Mr Potter and others have pointed out this is not a business model that can be sustained.

Eventually the for profit health insurance industry will fail, a victim of its own greed.

[1monster]

32. Well, in the spirit of that old Arabic saying, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend":

Anything the insurance industry wants, I don't want.

[McCamy Taylor]

34. SCOTUS Gang of Five do what RNC tells them.

If the RNC thinks overturning the whole act will help the GOP, they will overturn it regardless of what the insurance industry thinks.

[TrollBuster9090]

38. Of course they don't want it repealed, they stand to make a fortune.

And the Democrats were depending on that. (Rahm's idea.) The idea being that, rather than trying to pass legislation against the juggernaught of health care industry lobbying, they'd instead play SOME lobbyists against others. So, they made a special deal with the Pharmaceutical industry, and played them against the HMO industry. (It was big pharma that was running those pro-reform ads while the HMOs were bank rolling the anti-revorm ads.) However, in the end, the HMOs will make a fortune anyway. Heck, that's why they, the Heritage Foundation, and the GOP sponsored this idea in 1993 to begin with.

So, they managed (barely) to pass this law, at the expense of taking Nelson and a few other DINOs down in the process. But the HMOs and pharma certainly don't want it overturned. The main reason being that, if they overturn this law there is a fair chance that the Democrats will be forced to take another run at it, ...and THIS time the Democratic party base WON'T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER on the PUBLIC OPTION.

Also, mandated purchasing of health insurance may be unconstitutional, but SINGLE PAYER, funded through TAX MONEY certainy IS NOT unconstitutional. So, if the SCOTUS strikes this down, the proponents of single payer will have yet ANOTHER reason to argue that single payer is best. Because it's the only option that gets the job done and is FULLY constitutional.

So...I pitty those poor corporate shills on the Supreme Court! They must be shitting their robes over this! They now have a divided loyalty to the Republican base, who want to overturn this thing just to spite Obama, and to the chronie capitalist/ corporate welfare crowd, who stand to make a fortune off of it.

That's why, despite the way it looks, reports of the death of Obamacare are greatly exaggerated! I think it's entirely possible that you might see one of Roberts, Kennedy, or even THOMAS voting NOT to overturn Obamacare because the HMOs stand to make too much money off of it.

This can become a cool parlor game! Trying to which of the five 'conservative' justices will side with the Teabaggers vs. the Corporate Welfare Plutocrats. Damn, I love wedge issues.

[Cosmocat]

44. The question is which one of the five does the deed

I think Kennedy or Roberts.

Alito, Scalia and Thomas have too much right wing cred on the line.

I HOPE this is the game.

[unkachuck]

40. "...more and more to reward shareholders and senior executives."

"They cancel people’s health insurance when they get sick. They refuse to sell coverage to people who need coverage. They price policies so high that small businesses can no longer afford care."

....the for-profit health insurance industry are killers, pure and simple....they should all be brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague and charged with crimes against humanity....

[area51]

43. They are indeed serial killers.

Again, if our current health care delivery system, with lightly regulated middlemen standing between the patients and doctors, not to mention insanely twining together access to health care with employment is so wonderful, why is no country rushing to emulate us?

[AtopTheRacismNow]

46. "Whistleblower"

"Whistleblower"? waht is that? of course Rep. want BOTH objectives.