Some very good work passes by our eyes every Friday might on Bill Moyers’ Journal, and July 10 was no exception. His guest was Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications for CIGNA, the nation’s fourth largest health insurance company.
Potter had an epiphany of sorts, not unlike Dr. Peter Rost, former pharmaceutical executive who wrote a tell-all book, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Health Care Hitman. Potter’s came when he went to a health care expedition in Wise, West Virginia.
I borrowed my dad’s car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn’t know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health– booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.
But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they’d erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases– and I’ve got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.
And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee– all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.
There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.
BILL MOYERS: What did you think?
WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning.
Potter recalls later riding on a CIGNA jet and eating food from gold leaf china. The contrast between West Virginia and corporate luxury troubled him deeply.
“Okay, I can’t do this. I can’t keep– I can’t.” One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.”
And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president’s, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality.” And when I read that, I said, “Oh, jeez, I– you know. I’m headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something.”
That’s rare. Rare indeed. Most of us adapt our minds to the power structure around us, internalizing the contradictions and self-justifying as we must, shutting out everything else. I doubt any other health insurance executives in this country bother to attend health care expeditions. They are more likely to be found in their blinded offices looking over financial reports and making decisions that destroy lives. All in insulated splendor.
Sources now say that there’s a parade of lobbyists going in and out of Senator Max Baucus’s office. Recently the Washington Post disclosed (Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying) that Baucus is being lobbied by two former chiefs of staff, David Castagnetti, whose clients include PhRMA and America’s Health Insurance Plans, and Jeffrey A. Forbes, working now for PhRMA, Amgen, Genentech, Merck and others.
He’s completely shut off from ordinary people. He doesn’t know how bad it is, how ordinary people on Main Street don’t go see doctors because of cost, don’t have insurance because they can’t afford it or are not allowed the privilege.
Potter says that the industry has its ways. He talked about Michael Moore’s movie, Sicko, and how the insurance industry deliberately set out to blunt its effect on Capitol Hill:
WENDELL POTTER: …part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, “Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you.”
BILL MOYERS: How?
WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you’re running for reelection, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.
BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know [quoting from a document circulated on Capital Hill], “Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations–”
WENDELL POTTER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: “–including the Democratic Leadership Council.”
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: Then it says, “Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status.”
The people who lobby Capitol Hill are not amateurs, and they do not persuade by force of reason alone. Money and relationships are part of it, to be sure.
But my dark side also thinks that there is more, much more going on that we’ll never be privy to. There are potentially damaging financial relationships and sexual dalliances, knowledge of which is available to lobbyists when needed to keep congress people in line. John Ensign was recently exposed – how many other lay awake at night knowing that someone knows something about them- that they’ve been Abscammed or given the Gary Hart treatment?
In my many dark moments of concern for Max Baucus, I wonder if he’s been caught doing something naughty, perhaps even entrapped. That is, after all, a common form of persuasion – one that we seldom hear about. We only know the fallout.
We’re shut out. Our job is to break down the barriers, make our voices heard inside the velvet curtains of the offices of Congress. It’s not an easy task. Blogs don’t do it – staffers only monitor us for damage control. Phone calls and letters don’t do much good either -these people are not fools – they know what public opinion says. They are unable to respond to it.
Protests are routinely ignored – as Russian expatriate Dmitry Orlav observed,
The American way of dealing with dissent and with protest is certainly more advanced [than that in Russia]: why imprison dissidents when you can just let them shout into the wind to their heart’s content?
Baucus, of course, ham-handedly adopted the Russian response. He’s not particularly good at public relations.
What is the answer? It is no different for us than any other country under the thumb of power – we have to rise up and cast off our rulers. The various peoples of the Soviet Union did this with apparent ease, but theirs was a different situation. Most of them did not suffer the illusion of living under a democratic regime. Americans are deliberately led to think they are in charge of their own lives by mere exercise of meaningless voting rituals every two years, replacing one set of scoundrels with another. If it were that easy, the whole planet would be free.
I don’t see change happening any time soon, I’m afraid. I talk to very few people who have a much of a level of awareness of the true nature of our society and government. There are not enough to make a difference at this time.
So the only answers are patience and education.
