The following is an excerpt from a powerful testimonial from Wendell Potter concerning our broken health care industry. Wendell is a former insurance executive and the author of Deadly Spin, An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. Wendell is a friend of mine with a sincere heart and a deeply held conviction to do what is right in the face of so much manipulative PR and propaganda.
Wendell Potter Goes to Church
by Wendell Potter, Author of Deadly Spin
It never occurred to me when I borrowed my dad’s car to drive to something called a “Health Care Expedition” a few years ago that I was about to embark on a spiritual journey. The road I set out on that day—to the county fairgrounds in Wise, Virginia, 50 miles north of my hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee—turned out to be my Road to Damascus. A few months later I would leave my job as a health insurance executive and eventually become a vocal critic of my former industry and a dedicated advocate of health care reform.
Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw when I got to Wise County and walked through the fairground gates. I felt as if I had stepped into a movie set or a refugee camp in some war-torn third-world country. Hundreds of people, many of them soaking wet from the rain that had been falling all morning, were waiting in lines that stretched out of view. As I walked around, I noticed that some of those lines led to barns and cinder block buildings with row after row of animal stalls, where doctors and nurses, all of whom were volunteering their time, were treating patients. How was it possible that I was still in the United States of America, the country that I tried for years to make people believe had the best health care system on the planet?
As I took in the scene that day, I realized that the folks in those long lines could have been my relatives or my parents’ neighbors. They were people with whom I shared cultural roots but who, for whatever reason, simply hadn’t had the good fortune to land a high-paying job and a cushy office in one of the tallest buildings in Philadelphia. That was an epiphany—as was the realization that what I had been doing for a living as a top industry PR executive had at least in part made it necessary for those people to resort to getting care in animal stalls. I was part of an ongoing effort to obscure the reality that the U.S. health care system was failing more and more Americans every day and would soon fail all but the wealthiest of us if we didn’t take action to reform it.
Many of the 4,000 people who were treated over the three days of the expedition were people who had tried to buy insurance but had been turned down repeatedly because of “preexisting conditions.” Most of them had jobs but worked for companies that could no longer afford to offer coverage to their employees. And hundreds of them actually had insurance, but their benefits were so limited or their deductibles were so high that they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor or pick up their prescriptions.
(Read the rest of this post at www.fairlyspiritual.org)
Douglas Bursch is the author of Posting Peace: Why Social Media Divides Us and What We Can Do About It. He also hosts The Fairly Spiritual Show podcast.