Word: potters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Wendell Potter may be the ideal whistle-blower. The former head of corporate communications for health-insurance giant Cigna, Potter turned against his old colleagues in June to testify before a congressional committee about what he viewed as the health-insurance industry's "duplicitous" behavior in the current health-reform debate. In his testimony, Potter outlined specific techniques insurers employ to "dump the sick" and protect stock price at all costs. His testimony was logical, specific and convincing, but that's only part of what makes Wendell Potter a perfect turncoat in the eyes of the pro-reform movement. (Watch...
...other part is his manner. Before Congress, at subsequent pro-reform rallies around the country, and in the many television interviews Potter grants, he plays the role of the soft-spoken dad, calmly laying out his indictment of the for-profit insurance industry with a slight Tennessee twang, his gray hair buzzed and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He isn't prone to hyperbole and, despite his having become a whistle-blower to "make amends" for the wrong he feels he did as a health-insurance executive, Potter is eerily calm, an island of serenity...
...Potter's moment of decision came one evening earlier this year when he was watching MSNBC's Chris Matthews talk about how "the cosmos has shifted" this time around, that the health-insurance industry was at the negotiating table and on board with reform. Potter thought to himself, "Oh, jeez, Chris. Give me a break." Potter, who retired from Cigna in May 2008 after he became disillusioned with the for-profit health-insurance industry, decided to end his silence. (Potter's conversion was prompted in part by the 2007 case of 17-year-old Natalie Sarkisyan, who died shortly after...
...acquaintance helped usher Potter out of obscurity. Avram Goldstein was once a reporter for Bloomberg News who met Potter while writing about Cigna. Goldstein, who now works for the pro-reform advocacy group Health Care for America Now!, heard that Potter was quietly reaching out to some pro-reform advocates about possibly going public. "I called him, and I said, 'Is this true? Are you seriously interested in this?,' " remembers Goldstein. "And he said, 'Yes, I think I am.' He had a little bit of trepidation." Goldstein helped connect Potter with Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, who chairs the committee before...
...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...