You may remember Wendell Potter, the former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the largest health insurance companies in the US. Now a fellow at the Center for Media and Democracy, he gave senate testimony as a whistleblower last year against the HMO industry.
I quoted him then from an interview on Bill Moyers Journal about that testimony. He was on Moyers’ program again this weekend. From the transcript:
BILL MOYERS: So I hear Wendell Potter saying that if he were in the Senate or the House, he would vote for this reform?
WENDELL POTTER: I would vote for it. I was distraught when I saw what happened, what I saw the Senate voting on. But then I realized, you know, I studied a lot of these efforts over the past many years to get reform. And often we’ve come short because we’ve tried to get the perfect, and we’ve never been able to get anything as a consequence. … We need to have a foundation. And this may seem to be not an adequate foundation for a lot of people, but there are more than 50 million people in this country who don’t have insurance. I don’t want to go back and tell them, “I’m sorry. We just couldn’t get a good enough bill. So you’re going to have to wait to who knows when. Maybe you won’t live long enough.” 45 thousand people, Bill, die every year because they don’t have health insurance coverage. And that’s recent. In years to come, that will increase. People can’t wait any longer.
It’s Sunday morning, so I’ll go ahead and bloviate a bit about my own position on the health care bill…
For all the talk that Obama made a mistake putting it first, it was now or never in my lifetime. For all the criticism of how he did it, he would have the bill done already had Martha Coakley not treated her race like a walk in the park. For all the criticism of reconciliation, “I’m rubber you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you!”
To the criticism that the benefits don’t kick in until years down the road, I note that these benefits do kick in right away:
- The medicare drug coverage doughnut hole is closed
- Insurance companies can’t exclude coverage of preexisting illnesses
- No more recision
Those sound like benefits citizens, voters, will experience immediately. That helps Dems some in the November elections. If health care reform doesn’t pass, Obama tried and failed. He’ll get some small credit for that. He’ll recover. Dems won’t. Much bigger losses in the House; possible loss of control in the Senate (as upsetting as Brown in Massachusetts, and would require the same perfect storm conditions).