[Healthcare] The Wendell Potter Interview

[Derek Thunder]

Link to interview video and full transcript.

WENDELL POTTER: You know, I didn't, because for most of the time I was there, I felt that what we were doing was the right thing. And that I was playing on a team that was honorable. I just didn't really get it all that much until toward the end of my tenure at CIGNA.

BILL MOYERS: What did you see?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was beginning to question what I was doing as the industry shifted from selling primarily managed care plans, to what they refer to as consumer-driven plans. And they're really plans that have very high deductibles, meaning that they're shifting a lot of the cost off health care from employers and insurers, insurance companies, to individuals. And a lot of people can't even afford to make their co-payments when they go get care, as a result of this. But it really took a trip back home to Tennessee for me to see exactly what is happening to so many Americans. I--

BILL MOYERS: When was this?

WENDELL POTTER: This was in July of 2007.

BILL MOYERS: You were still working for CIGNA?

WENDELL POTTER: I was. I went home, to visit relatives. And I picked up the local newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued.

BILL MOYERS: So you drove there?

WENDELL POTTER: I did. I borrowed my dad's car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.

Meanwhile, the possibility of a public option founders in the Senate Finance Committee, and the town hall meetings of congresspeople across the nation are devolving into feces throwing matches over the notion of Obama condemning the elderly to "death panels" reminiscent of the episode of the Twilight Zone starring Burgess Merideth as The Obsolete Man.

[rhoenix]

Same strategy of before, just more blatant - inspire visceral reactions to impassion people, and make sure they don't think too deeply about things. It's rather effective, too.

However, this Wendell Potter interview shows the real problem, and what's really at stake - something which requires consideration, discussion, and some compromise to get working correctly.

So, next we hear "FASCIST NAZI GERIATRIC-KILLER RADICAL RACIST," all of which are words designed to have an emotional impact.

Tony Benn was quoted in the movie Sicko as saying (and I'm paraphrasing) "an educated, healthy populace is difficult to control. Fear and ignorance are the best tools to control people, and dictators have been using them for many centuries."

[SirNitram]

Hey, assaulting a Democratic freshmen representative, causing an angry mob which injures multiple people, hanging in effigy, and endless nazi comparisons.. They're all just freedom of speech. Honest. The Centrists and Conservatives told me so.

[Derek Thunder]

Gosh golly!

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Frankly I don't understand any of Obama's bipartisan tendencies in light of his opposition.

[rhoenix]

Frankly I don't understand any of Obama's bipartisan tendencies in light of his opposition.

I think that might just be his plan. To appear as the reasonable one, the one who keeps extending a hand to the Republicans only to get it slapped or bitten repeatedly, in full view of the public at large.

In light of the hyperventilating about...well, everything from the Republican side going on though, I think if true, this particular strategy will take a while to take hold.