Potter was Head of Communications at CIGNA, one of the largest health insurance companies in the United States. In his two-decade career, he assisted the effort to promote private health insurers and kill President Clinton's health care plans in 1993. Potter resigned last year and is now working at the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy. His new position works to expose the lies that corporations and governments spin for the media. He is now directly opposing the health insurance industry, including the CIGNA Corporation that once employed him.
The health care industry is going to extraordinary measures to prevent or castrate President Obama's health care initiative, and guess what -- right now, it's working. One specific part of the article stood out:
The most vocal folks at the town hall meetings seem to share the same ideology as my kinfolks in East Tennessee and my former CIGNA buddy: the less government involvement in our lives, the better.
That point couldn't have been made clearer than by the man standing in line to get free care at Remote Area Medical's recent health care "expedition" at the Wise County, Virginia, fairgrounds, who told a reporter he was dead set against President Obama's reform proposal.
Even though he didn't have health insurance, and could see the desperation in the faces of thousands of others all around him who were in similar straits, he was more worried about the possibility of having to pay more taxes than he was eager to make sure he and his neighbors wouldn't have to wait in line to get care provided by volunteer doctors in animal stalls.This alone is enough to infuriate me. Those who stand to gain the most from a public health care system are the ones screaming to destroy it. Absolutely ridiculous.
Here is Wendell Potter's organization, the Center for Media and Democracy.
Why is this "desperation"? I think you are buying into the public and private insurers' lies about insurance being necessary in order to get health care. Many people from all walks of life and all levels of income get health care without insurance. Most of that health care is provided in modern hospitals, not in animal stalls, by competent to top-notch physicians and supporting medical staff. Some of it is municipal or charity care -- a holdover from the municipal and charity hospitals before insurance took over -- but most of it is paid for either directly by the patient or indirectly by membership dues in a medical care club or equivalent, e.g. GWUHP in the early 80's.
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