Wendell Potter's News Articles

Wendell Potter: The Deadly Spin on Health Care Repeal

by Wendell Potter — January 12, 2011 - 5:02pm
  • Topics: Health, Lobbying, Politics

    • Advocates of health care reform who are fearful -- or hopeful, as the case may be -- that Republicans will be able to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") need to understand that the GOP has no real intention of repealing it.

    The rhetoric of repeal is just a smoke screen to obscure the real objective of the "repeal and replace" caucus: to preserve the sections of the law that big insurance and its business allies like and strip out the regulations and consumer protections they don't like.

    The rhetoric is necessary, of course, to keep fooling the people they fooled in the first place (with a corporate-funded campaign of lies and deception) into thinking that repeal would be in their best interests. For the same reason, it will be necessary for the Republican-controlled House to pass the two-page bill their PR consultants drafted to repeal the law. (Calling it the "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act" is a tactic that comes straight out of the playbook I describe in my book, Deadly Spin.)

    Insurers Spin Court Decision on Health Insurance Mandate

    by Wendell Potter — December 14, 2010 - 12:35pm
  • Topics: Corporations, Health, Propaganda, U.S. Government

    • When I testified before Congress last year, I told lawmakers that if they passed a health care reform bill with an individual mandate but no public option, they might as well call their bill the "Health Insurance Profit Protection and Enhancement Act." Well, of course, that is exactly what Congress did, but they didn't change the name of the new law as I suggested. I was as upset as anyone that the public option was stripped out, but I nevertheless later said that Congress should still pass the bill because of the protections it contained against common predatory practices by insurers, like canceling breast cancer patients' insurance in the midst of treatment and refusing to sell coverage at any price to people with pre-existing conditions. The bill also expands Medicaid to encompass several million Americans who cannot afford to buy overpriced and often inadequate health insurance.

    "Friendly Reminder": Fox's Unbalanced Ethics Threaten Democracy

    by Wendell Potter — December 9, 2010 - 2:12pm
  • Topics: Journalism, Democracy, Ethics

    • Anyone who still clings to the notion that Fox News is actually a news organization rather than a propaganda machine for special interests -- and that it actually is led by journalists who adhere to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists -- must read the leaked memos Media Matters disclosed this morning.

    Under the heading of "Fox boss caught slanting news reporting," Media Matters shared on its Web site an internal memo that Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington managing editor, sent a memo "at the height of the health care reform debate" to his network's so-called journalists, directing them not to use the phrase "public option."

    Instead, Sammon told them, they should use focus-tested Republican and insurance industry talking points "to turn public opinion against the Democrats' reform efforts."

    Edelman's Glass House

    by Wendell Potter — December 1, 2010 - 9:33pm

    Over Thanksgiving week, the head of the global PR firm, Edelman, publicly complained about my tough critique of the damage the PR industry has done through campaigns that deceive consumers.

    On the one hand, I was a bit surpised by Edelman's rather absurd claim that I had "no right to say" that big PR firms have a reputation for deceiving people, and that I should not have called into question the (profit) motive of PR practitioners who are really just "interested in the truth and in educating stakeholders about the issues of our time." After 30 years in the PR industry, I most certainly do have a right to call out the deceptive campaigns PR firms have orchestrated to obscure the truth and deceive the American public in the debate over health care reform and beyond. I detail these campaigns at length in my book, Deadly Spin, which is based on my own participation in just these practices.

    Does "Ethical PR" HAVE to be an Oxymoron, Richard Edelman?

    by Wendell Potter — November 28, 2010 - 8:45pm

    A few days ago, the Sammie Lynn Puett Chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) invited me to speak at the University of Tennessee's PR Day. It was more of an honor to be asked than the students will ever know. I don't think many of them knew I was a charter member of that PRSSA chapter back in the '70s and that Sammie Lynn Puett, a revered figure on campus for many years, had been my teacher, student adviser and, later in life, my mentor. Sammie Lynn had been a journalist before going into teaching and taught several journalism courses, including the first one I ever took, Basic News Writing. She also served for a while as a PR professional, and was determined to establish a comprehensive PR curriculum at UT. It hadn't been fully fleshed out by the time I graduated in 1973, but I took every PR course offered at the time, including all of the graduate level courses. The first PR textbook I ever used was Effective Public Relations by Scott Cutlip and Allen Center. First published in 1952, it is still considered the PR "bible" by many PR teachers and practitioners. In my view, one of the reasons it is called the PR bible is that Cutlip & Center, from the very beginning, preached the importance of ethics and ethical behavior. As I told the students at PR Day, I did not learn in PR school -- not from Cutlip & Center, and certainly not from Sammie Lynn -- how to set up fake grassroots organizations and front groups to disseminate false or misleading information in order to manipulate public opinion and influence public policy. I would not learn how to do that -- and how prevalent such PR practices are -- until many years later, when I was deep into my career as a corporate communications executive.

    Wendell Potter: "My Apologies to Michael Moore and the Health Insurance Industry"

    by Wendell Potter — November 22, 2010 - 10:14am

    In advance of my appearance with Michael Moore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight on MSNBC (8 and 11 p.m. ET), I would like to offer an apology to both Moore and his arch enemy, the health insurance industry, which spent a lot of policyholder premiums in 2007 to attack his movie, Sicko. I need to apologize to Moore for the role I played in the insurance industry's public relations attack campaign again him and Sicko, which was about the increasingly unfair and dysfunctional U.S. health care system. (I was head of corporate communications at one of the country's biggest insurance companies when I left my job in May 2008.) And I need to apologize to health insurers for failing to note in my new book, Deadly Spin, that the front group they used to attack Moore and Sicko -- Health Care America -- was originally a front group for drug companies. APCO Worldwide, the PR firm that operated the front group for insurers during the summer of 2007, was outraged -- outraged, I tell you -- that I wrote in the book that the raison d'être for Health Care America was to disseminate the insurance industry's talking points as part of a multi-pronged, fear-mongering campaign against Moore and his movie. An APCO executive told a reporter who had reviewed the book that I was guilty of one of the deceptive PR tactics I condemned: the selective disclosure of information to manipulate public opinion.

    A Verbal Slip on Countdown

    by Wendell Potter — November 19, 2010 - 4:46pm

    What a difference a word can make -- nothing short of the difference between good and evil.

    During my interview on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC Wednesday night, I explained the sinister work of an industry-funded front group to discredit Michael Moore as a filmmaker and citizen and especially of his 2007 movie, Sicko. The PR firm hired by health insurers to do the evil deed set up and operated a front group, named "Health Care America," to conduct a fear-mongering campaign designed to scare people away from the movie's core message: that every developed country in the world except the United States has been able to achieve universal coverage for their citizens largely because they don't allow big insurance companies to call the shots like they do here. I wrote about this in my book, Deadly Spin, in the chapter entitled "The Campaign Against Sicko."

    I inadvertently called the front group "Health Care America Now" in response to a question from Keith Olbermann. That misstatement has led to some confusion, so I want to set the record straight. Health Care for America Now is one of the good guys, in my view. It is a real grassroots organization comprising a broad range of groups throughout the country advocating for "quality, affordable health care." Health Care America was what is commonly known as a fake grassroots or "Astroturf" organization. It was set up and operated by a big PR firm and funded by Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

    Consumers Win Important Battle Over How Health Care Reform Will Be Implemented

    by Wendell Potter — October 21, 2010 - 12:45pm
  • Topics: Corporations, Health, U.S. Government

    • Earlier this week I asked you to send thank-you notes to one of America's biggest health insurers for helping to shed light on an important policy matter. If you did, thank you, but please don't put your good stationery away just yet. You need to write yet another note of gratitude -- this time to our state insurance commissioners. This morning they did the right thing for consumers when they refused to cave in to intense pressure from the profit-obsessed insurance industry to gut an important provision of the health care reform law.

    UnitedHealth's Big Announcement: Just What the Doctor Ordered?

    by Wendell Potter — October 19, 2010 - 3:05pm
  • Topics: Corporations, Lobbying, U.S. Government

    • Thank you, UnitedHealth Group. Your jaw-dropping profit announcement may be just what the doctor ordered.

    ORLANDO--If you are hopeful that the consumer protections in the health care reform law actually wind up benefiting consumers more than the insurance industry, please send a thank-you note to executives at UnitedHealth Group, the largest U.S. health insurer.

    United announced Tuesday morning that it's third-quarter profit jumped 23% -- much more than investors and analysts had expected -- largely because it spent far less of its customers' premiums on medical care than it did this time last year. When an insurance company spends less of every premium dollar it takes in on medical care, it has more left over to reward shareholders and a handful of senior managers who already are among the highest-paid executives on the planet.

    New Health Care Provisions Begin to Pay Off for All Ages

    by Wendell Potter — September 23, 2010 - 10:41am
  • Topics: Corporations, Health, Human Rights

    • Originally published on September 22, 2010 in Health Care and Tennessee Voices.

    As I sit beside my 92-year-old father in his hospital bed in Kingsport, Tennessee, there are reminders all around me of why I left my job in the insurance industry to become an advocate for health-care reform — and why all Americans have reasons to be grateful that many provisions of the reform bill that became law six months ago are taking effect now.

    To begin with, there is my dad himself. He must take costly medications every day. This year he and millions of other older Americans fell into the Medicare Part D "doughnut hole." They have to spend thousands of dollars for medicines they need before their drug benefit will kick back in. The new law has already begun to reduce their pharmacy expenses.

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