"We Shouldn't Fear Government Involvement in Our Health Care System"

This is my second post on Wendell Potter’s interview on Bill Moyers Journal.  You can read the first part, or you can go straight to PBS.org to watch the whole program online.

Wendell Potter was a top-ranked executive at Cigna when the insurance industry began to bat down the outrage produced by Michael Moore’s Sicko.  That playbook of how they pressured Congress to take no action whatsoever in the face of Moore’s documentary should be very familiar to those watching the political dance going on in Washington.  Focus on the minority of “disaster” stories from those in England in Canada, even if those stories don’t represent the average experience.  Use your lobbying power to influence Democrats, especially centrist Democrats.  Threaten political reprisal.  Mock those who are advocating reform as being out-of-touch – a neat trick coming from executives who, as Potter mentions in the previous clip, flew in corporate jets and ate lunch with gold-plated silverware.

All of this was to obfuscate the central truth of Moore’s message – a truth that threatened the industry’s profits.  As defined by Potter, that truth is “That we shouldn't fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it's been proven in the countries that were in that movie.”

It’s a shame that the clip cuts off where it does, as Potter goes on to make an eloquent case that if we don’t reform health care, it will change all the same – just in a direction that none of us want:

You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.

And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don't want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It's more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you're in now to one that you don't want. You might be in the plan you like now.

But chances are, pretty soon, you're going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you're going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.