"What Country Is This?" - Potter on Bill Moyers

I’ve written about Wendell Potter, the former executive at Cigna and Humana whose Congressional testimony helped pull away the curtain on how private, for-profit insurance companies look at themselves – as entities more beholden to shareholders than their customers. On Friday night, he was the guest on Bill Moyers Journal.  PBS.org has the whole program online, but they’ve also released clips like the one below on YouTube.  If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing – which I highly recommend – these bite-size chunks are must-see.

You often hear people who know very little on the topic proclaim that people come from across the world to receive health care in the United States.  That may be – but it’s just as typical these days for Americans to become “medical tourists” to other countries because of cost.  Far more typical, and sometimes far more shocking, are free clinics for those who are uninsured and have nowhere else to go.  They tend to be in rural areas and are typified by the “health care expedition” or makeshift clinic near where Potter grew up.  The experience of seeing the clinic first hand (and taking pictures) helped change his mind on how beneficent the industry he worked for truly was.  It’s hard to fly in corporate jets and eat lunch with gold-plated silverware when you’ve seen how your company’s obsession with lowering their “medical losses” – the term used by the industry when they have to actually pay for care – is affecting real people.

Watch the first of these clips below: