Health Care For America Now

A few days ago, the Sammie Lynn Puett Chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) invited me to speak at the University of Tennessee's PR Day. It was more of an honor to be asked than the students will ever know. I don't think many of them knew I was a charter member of that PRSSA chapter back in the '70s and that Sammie Lynn Puett, a revered figure on campus for many years, had been my teacher, student adviser and, later in life, my mentor. 

Sammie Lynn had been a journalist before going into teaching and taught several journalism courses, including the first one I ever took, Basic News Writing. She also served for a while as a PR professional, and was determined to establish a comprehensive PR curriculum at UT. It hadn't been fully fleshed out by the time I graduated in 1973, but I took every PR course offered at the time, including all of the graduate level courses. 

The first PR textbook I ever used was Effective Public Relations by Scott Cutlip and Allen Center. First published in 1952, it is still considered the PR "bible" by many PR teachers and practitioners. In my view, one of the reasons it is called the PR bible is that Cutlip & Center, from the very beginning, preached the importance of ethics and ethical behavior. As I told the students at PR Day, I did not learn in PR school — not from Cutlip & Center, and certainly not from Sammie Lynn — how to set up fake grassroots organizations and front groups to disseminate false or misleading information in order to manipulate public opinion and influence public policy. I would not learn how to do that — and how prevalent such PR practices are — until many years later, when I was deep into by career as a corporate communications executive.

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(L-R) Alex Potter, Michael Moore and Wendell Potter In advance of my appearance with Michael Moore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann tonight on MSNBC (8 and 11 p.m. ET), I would like to offer an apology to both Moore and his arch enemy, the health insurance industry, which spent a lot of policyholder premiums in 2007 to attack his movie, Sicko.

I need to apologize to Moore for the role I played in the insurance industry's public relations attack campaign again him and Sicko, which was about the increasingly unfair and dysfunctional U.S. health care system. (I was head of corporate communications at one of the country's biggest insurance companies when I left my job in May 2008.) And I need to apologize to health insurers for failing to note in my new book, Deadly Spin, that the front group they used to attack Moore and Sicko — Health Care America — was originally a front group for drug companies. APCO Worldwide, the PR firm that operated the front group for insurers during the summer of 2007, was outraged — outraged, I tell you — that I wrote in the book that the raison d'être for Health Care America was to disseminate the insurance industry's talking points as part of a multi-pronged, fear-mongering campaign against Moore and his movie. An APCO executive told a reporter who had reviewed the book that I was guilty of one of the deceptive PR tactics I condemned: the selective disclosure of information to manipulate public opinion. 

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Here is a statement from Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now (HCAN), on the Health and Human Services Department’s issuance today of a medical-loss ratio (MLR) regulation as required by the Affordable Care Act:

“American families and businesses came out on top today. The new MLR rule is a tough, commonsense, fair regulation that for the first time requires health insurance companies to put patient care before excessive profits and CEO pay. The rule provides important new protections and choices to consumers and levels the playing field for insurers. The industry now has clear goals that responsible companies can achieve, and if insurance companies don’t comply they’ll have to pay rebates to their customers.

“This rule will change the way health insurance companies do business, and along with other provisions, the Affordable Care Act will end such unconscionable abuses as denying people coverage because they are sick. That's the kind of anti-consumer behavior the Republican Party is fighting to bring back by pushing for repeal of the newlaw, which would disrupt the market and hurt consumers. When the Republicanscall for repeal, they’re talking about throwing out rules like this one and putting consumers at the mercy of the insurance companies again. The Republican repeal-mongers are not only on the wrong side, they’re also just plain out-of-touch with the needs of businesses to move forward and the desires of consumers to have better care.”

What a difference a word can make — nothing short of the difference between good and evil.

During my interview on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC Wednesday night, I explained the sinister work of an industry-funded front group to discredit Michael Moore as a filmmaker and citizen and especially of his 2007 movie, Sicko. The PR firm hired by health insurers to do the evil deed set up and operated the front group, which it named “Health Care America,” to conduct a fear-mongering campaign designed to scare people away from the movie’s core message: that every developed country in the world except the United States has been able to achieve universal coverage for their citizens largely because they don’t allow big insurance companies to call the shots like they do here. I wrote about this in my book, Deadly Spin, in the chapter entitled “The Campaign Against Sicko.”

I inadvertently called the front group “Health Care America Now” in response to a question from Keith Olbermann. That misstatement has led to some confusion, so I want to set the record straight. Health Care for America Now is one of the good guys, in my view. It is a real grassroots organization comprising a broad range of groups throughout the country advocating for “quality, affordable health care.” Health Care America was what is commonly known as a fake grassroots or “Astroturf” organization. It was set up and operated by a big PR firm and funded by Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

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by Wendell Potter on November 19th, 2010

What a difference a word can make — nothing short of the difference between good and evil.

During my interview on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC Wednesday night, I explained the sinister work of an industry-funded front group to discredit Michael Moore as a filmmaker and citizen and especially of his 2007 movie Sicko. The PR firm hired by health insurers to do the evil deed set up and operated the front group, which it named “Health Care America,” to conduct a fear-mongering campaign designed to scare people away from the movie’s core message: that every developed country in the world except the United States has been able to achieve universal coverage for their citizens largely because they don’t allow big insurance companies to call the shots like they do here. I wrote about this in my book, Deadly Spin, in the chapter entitled “The Campaign Against Sicko.”

I inadvertently called the front group “Health Care America Now” in response to a question from Keith Olbermann. That misstatement has led to some confusion, so I want to set the record straight. Health Care for America Now is one of the good guys, in my view. It is a real grassroots organization comprising a broad range of groups throughout the country advocating for “quality, affordable health care.” Health Care America was what is commonly known as a fake grassroots or “Astroturf” organization. It was set up and operated by a big PR firm and funded by Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

For more information about Health Care for America Now (also known by its acronym, HCAN), visit its Web site at healthcareforamericanow.org. For more information about Health Care America, click this link, which will take you to the Sourcewatch.org page that describes the organization. The Web site for Health Care America no longer is active. It was dismantled shortly after its work to discredit Michael Moore and Sicko was done.

Health Insurers Cut Spending on Care, Drop Unprofitable Members

Insurance Companies Force Consumers to Pay Bigger Share of Health Bills;

Republicans Aim to Kill Consumer Protections by Repealing New Law

Washington, DC — The six largest investor-owned health insurance companies recorded huge profit gains in the third quarter of 2010 by spending a smaller share of premiums on medical care, purging unprofitable members and burdening consumers with higher cost-sharing limits. WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc., Aetna Inc., Humana Inc., Cigna Corp. and Coventry Health Care Inc. made combined profits of $3.4 billion in the three months ending Sept. 30, a 22% increase over the third quarter of 2009 (Table 1 – SEE PDF OF RELEASE), according to an analysis of company filings by Health Care for America Now (HCAN).

“The insurance companies are jacking up rates and selling lousy coverage without regard to the devastating impact on real people’s financial security and their health,” said HCAN Executive Director Ethan Rome. “Their behavior is offensive, and it’s outrageous that the Republicans in Congress want to give control of our health care back to the insurance companies by repealing the Affordable Care Act. We need the law and the protections it provides.”

One reason premiums and profits continue rising is that insurers keep reducing the percentage of premiums they spend on actual health care (Table 2 - SEE PDF OF RELEASE), a measurement known as the medical-loss ratio, or MLR, by denying people care. Coventry cut its MLR for employer and individual health plans by an unheard-of 5.3 percentage points to 76.8%. That increased Coventry’s third-quarter profit by 169% from a year earlier. Aetna’s MLR plunged 5.1 percentage points to 80.5%, and its third-quarter profit surged 53%. Other companies also reported double-digit profit growth and major reductions in MLRs, consistent with long–term industry trends. In 1993, the leading health insurers used about 95 cents of every premium dollar on actual health care. By 2007, after years of mergers and acquisitions that put much of the U.S. population under the control of a handful of for-profit companies, investor-owned health insurers had jacked up premiums and lowered the medical-loss ratio to around 81%.

“The financial engineers running the insurance companies know they make money by denying care, and they makemore money by denying more care,” said Rome. “That’s why the tough protections and increased competition and choice in the new law are so important. The law ends the total stranglehold that these companies have on our health care.”

New minimum MLRs are set to take effect next year under the new law. The landmark health care legislation requires insurance companies to spend up to 85% of premiums on medical services instead of profits and executive pay. Insurers also must publicly defend their premium hikes. The law will guarantee health security for all Americans and end the worst insurance company abuses, such as pre-existing condition exclusions.

“The health insurance companies continue to blame skyrocketing insurance premiums on rising medical costs when they know that’s simply not true,” said Rome. Rate hikes have for years greatly surpassed the growth of medical costs, wages and overall inflation. According to HCAN, they are the result of excessive profits, money-driven customer abuses and extravagant executive compensation.

As insurers set more earnings records, more financially stressed health plan members have chosen less expensive catastrophic coverage with high deductibles and co-payments. This flimsy coverage has caused a growing number of people with health insurance to avoid their doctors, leave prescriptions unfilled and skip diagnostic tests recommended by physicians.

With premiums out of control and the economy weak, the number of Americans without health coverage soared as high as 59 million last year. From Dec. 31, 2008, to Sept. 30, 2010, the combined commercial enrollment of the six companies fell by a staggering 3.4 million, according to the HCAN analysis (Table 3 - SEE PDF OF RELEASE). Many people who lose coverage remain uninsured or apply for federal–state Medicaid benefits.

“The health care law for the first time will put a check on the out-of-control behavior of the insurancecompanies,” Rome said. “Repealing this law is the most anti-consumer thing the Congress can do, and it’s the only health care idea the Republicans appear to have.”

VIEW TABLES IN PDF HERE