The COVID pandemic has wrought unprecedented economic strife worldwide. Despite the public hardship, one sector profits handsomely from the pandemic: health insurance.
Healthcare plans are poised to make record profits this year. They continue to collect premiums, but their coverage of COVID care is spotty at best, and with so many clinics closed and non-COVID care deferred, their “medical losses” (aka spending on actual care) are at an all-time low.
Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications for Cigna, understands the machinations of the insurance industry like few others could. After a long career seeing firsthand how strategic PR and lobbying unfairly tilt the scales toward corporate interests against the needs of practitioners and patients, Potter left the board room to educate people about the realities of the medical-industrial complex.
With his 2010 book, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care & Deceiving Americans,Potter went from being one of the industry’s star spokesmen, to one of its worst nightmares. His second book, Nation On The Take, co-authored with Nick Penniman, reveals how special interest groups now co-opt and control all levels of government.
Potter is now the president of Business Leaders for Health Care Transformation, an advocacy group for meaningful healthcare reform.
Join Holistic Primary Care’s editor, Erik Goldman, for this special live interview with the man TIME magazine called, “the ideal whistleblower.”
We’ll explore:
- How insurers have taken advantage of COVID to further concentrate wealth and power, while spinning “good guy” tales about themselves
- How UnitedHealth Group—the largest for-profit insurer, and the nation’s biggest employer of physicians—came to be in charge of billions in federal aid for hospitals on the COVID frontlines.
- What is likely to happen as the pandemic drags on, and more people lose their jobs–and their coverage
- What we can do to restore health and sanity to the nation’s healthcare systems
And more….
