My name is Wendell Potter and for 20 years, I worked as a senior executive
at health insurance companies, and I saw how they confuse their customers
and dump the sick –- all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.
“The United States spends more than twice as much on health
care<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Health_care>as the
average of other developed nations, all of which boast universal
coverage. Yet over 39 million Americans have no health insurance whatsoever,
and most others are underinsured, in the sense that they lack adequate
coverage for all contingencies (e.g., long-term care and prescription drug
costs). However, other systems that are completely or partially based on
social risk-pooling principles are under threat from neoliberal policies
worldwide[1] <http://www.dhrsa.org.uk/>.
Why is the U. S. so different? The short answer is that the U.S. is alone in
treating health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to
pay, rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical
need.”
Wendell Potter: How Corporate PR Works to Kill Health Care Reform
When I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in late June, I told
the senators how the industry has conducted duplicitous and well-financed PR
and lobbying campaigns every time Congress has tried to reform our health
care system, and how its current behind-scenes-efforts may well shape reform
in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans. I noted
that, just as they did 15 years ago when the insurance industry led the
effort to kill the Clinton reform plan, it is using shills and front
groups<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=front_groups>to
spread lies and disinformation to scare Americans away from the very
reform that would benefit them most. The industry, despite its public
assurances to be good-faith partners with the President and Congress, has
been at work for years laying the groundwork for devious and often sinister
campaigns to manipulate public opinion.
Direct comparisons of health statistics across nations are complex.
The Commonwealth
Fund <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fund>, in its annual survey,
“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”, compares the performance of the health care
systems in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and
the U.S. Its 2007 study found that, although the U.S. system is the most
expensive, it consistently underperforms compared to the other countries.[11
] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#cite_note-10> A major
difference between the U.S. and the other countries in the study is that the
U.S. is the only country without universal health
care<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care>
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Permaculture Cooperative, 03/23/2010