Word: potterer
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...month when nothing much new is happening, Hollywood moguls look back at the blockbuster summer; they might be teenage girls who can't forget the boys on the beach. Moneywise, the memories will be sweet. Transformers 2 hit the $400 million mark, Harry Potter 6 wand-ered toward $300 million, and Up and The Hangover weren't far behind. The robotoid sequel is just the ninth film to enter the 400 Club, and soon it will pass No. 8, Spider-Man - though adjusted for inflation, Transformers 2 is just 67th...
...Potter is now the only health-insurance insider to lambaste - on the record - the industry's motives. Potter warns that the industry's cooperation, which has been hailed by Democrats, is hogwash, a "charm offensive" designed to disguise its true motive: profit. "This is just a repeat of what they've done before," says Potter, who was hired by Cigna around the time of President Clinton's push for reform in the early 1990s. Insurers were then, as now, pledging change in order to improve health care for Americans...
Unlike Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco-industry whistle-blower made famous in the movie The Insider, Potter doesn't have a smoking gun or secret documents to unveil. He signed a confidentiality agreement before leaving Cigna and intends to honor it. "I have no intention of disclosing any proprietary information," he says. For-profit health-insurance-industry practices Potter talks about, like rescission - dropping expensive-to-cover policyholders on grounds that they failed to disclose pre-existing health conditions - are not secrets. This is, in fact, how private health insurers make profits. In Potter's view, these practices just need more...
Although he's busy, Potter now earns far less than he did at Cigna, where he made "in the six figures." He's a nonsalaried consultant for the Center for Media and Democracy but has health-insurance coverage through his wife, who manages a Banana Republic store. It's a low-cost, high-deductible plan - a model that provides coverage for catastrophic illness but kicks in only after the policyholder spends thousands of dollars out of pocket first. In other words, it's an insurance-industry-friendly model that companies like Cigna would like to see spread under health-reform...
Stardom has inundated Potter with pleas to speak at pro-reform events around the country. He obliges nearly every time, relieved at "being able to say what I really believe" after so many years as a tight-lipped health-insurance public-relations executive. Still, he isn't entirely comfortable being a health-reform celebrity. "Even as I'm living this, it seems like there's another Wendell Potter out there and I'm somehow observing this," he says. "I was in Oregon [at a rally] and I heard someone whisper, 'There's Wendell Potter.' That was a very odd thing...