The "salon" part of the FDL book salon is found in the comments. Authors are invited to chat with FDL members who ask questions and dialogue. This conversation with Potter is particularly worth having. There's also some interesting tidbits, such as why Potter got involved...he says, "I got courage actually from getting really pissed off by a fellow Tennessean. I wish I could say it was more noble than that. I just got very angry when a Tennessee congressman said on TV that half the people who are uninsured are that way by choice. I decided then and there to get in the fray."
Check it out!!
-- brook
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http://fdlbooksalon.com/2011/02/13/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-wendell-potter-deadly-spin-an-insurance-company-insider-speaks-out-on-how-corporate-pr-is-killing-health-care-and-deceiving-americans/FDL Book Salon Welcomes Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving AmericansAuthor: Wendell Potter
Sunday, February 13, 2011 11:45 am Pacific time
Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans
John Chandley, Host:
Many of you who closely followed the national debate leading up to the Affordable Care Act of 2010 know about Wendell Potter. He’s the former VP of Communications at health insurer giant CIGNA who resigned his head PR job in May 2008 after he came to believe his job and the industry he was shielding were morally offensive.
Potter’s resignation followed a series of “road to Damascus” epiphanies, including a visit to a free health care clinic in 2007, where he saw thousands of uninsured and underinsured Americans lined up to get care they could not otherwise afford, even with insurance. He helped the industry plot how to discredit Michael Moore and SICKO, but he realized that Moore’s basic points were correct. He later apologized to Moore on Countdown.
(snip)
In July of 2009 Potter first appeared in the national debate, testifying before Senator Rockefeller’s Committee on how health insurers cynically used rescission, denial of coverage, purging of small businesses (with older, sicker workers) to limit coverage. Soon after, he did a half-hour interview on Bill Moyers Journal, interviews on Democracy Now and became a regular on network and cable shows during the health reform debate.
Deadly Spin retells much of that reform effort story, and that alone is a great read and a fine resource from an ex-industry insider. But there’s much more here.
That story becomes a platform for relating over a hundred years of failed efforts, led by corporate America, to bring universal health care to America. We’re still failing, though Potter, who endorsed the need for a strong Public Option, calls the ACA a “partial victory, of sorts.”Deadly Spin is necessarily an indictment of private health insurance. We read of its evolution and market concentration after the Clinton failure, its capture by Wall Street and how investors’ demand for profits and lower “medical loss ratios” combined with CEOs’ greed for obscene compensation to drive actual “health care” out of insurer’s corporate priorities
But as worth reading as all that is,
it’s all preface to Potter’s broader message: that American democracy is now being systematically “spun” by corporate PR – much of it dishonest and harmful propaganda – in ways that stifle needed reforms in every field from health care to food safety to energy and climate change and financial reform.
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