Here is a comment from Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now (HCAN), on the health insurance premium rate review rules announced today by the Department of Health and Human Services:

“Consumers won an important victory today over the $800 billion-a-year health insurance industry. These new rules will help stop health insurance companies from ramming unjustified premium rate increases down our throats and basing double-digit rate hikes on phony calculations. The companies have been making out like bandits with massive rate increases that have no relationship to their actual costs. From 1999 to 2009, health insurance companies raised premiums a staggering 131 percent – three times the growth of wages and four times the rate of overall inflation.

"For the first time there are rules to hold the insurance companies accountable for huge rate hikes by shining light on the financial data they claim justifiesdouble-digit rate increases year after year. The days of insurance companies running roughshod over consumers and jacking up our rates whenever they want are over. The new rate review rules represent a key step toward finally ending the insurance companies’ stranglehold on our health care.

“Not surprisingly, the Republicans want to repeal this rate review process and all the other tough consumer protections in the new health care law, such as the ban on denying sick people care. The Republicans care more about the excessive profits of the insurance companies than the health care of America's struggling middle-class families.”

When I testified before Congress last year, I told lawmakers that if they passed a health care reform bill with an individual mandate but no public option, they might as well call their bill the "Health Insurance Profit Protection and Enhancement Act." Well, of course, that is exactly what Congress did, but they didn't change the name of the new law as I suggested.

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Anyone who still clings to the notion that Fox News is actually a news organization rather than a propaganda machine for special interests — and that it actually is led by journalists who adhere to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists — must read the leaked memos Media Matters disclosed this morning.

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by Wendell Potter

Anyone who still clings to the notion that Fox News is actually a news organization rather than a propaganda machine for special interests — and that it actually is led by journalists who adhere to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists — must read the leaked memos Media Matters for America disclosed this morning.

Under the heading of "Fox boss caught slanting news reporting," Media Matters shared on its Web site an internal memo that Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington managing editor, sent a memo "at the height of the health care reform debate" to his network's so-called journalists, directing them not to use the phrase "public option."

Instead, Sammon told them, they should use focus-tested Republican and insurance industry talking points "to turn public opinion against the Democrats' reform efforts."

In his October 27, 2009 memo to his staff, Sammon offered what he call a "friendly reminder: let's not slip back into calling it the 'public option.'" Instead, he ordered:

1)  Please use the term "government-run health insurance" or, when brevity is a concern, "government option," whenever possible.2) When it is necessary to use the term "public option" (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation's lexicon), use the qualifier "so-called," as in "the so-called public option."

3) Here's another way to phrase it: "The public option, which is the government-run plan."

4) When newsmakers and sources use the term "public option" in our stories, there's not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

As I wrote in my book, Deadly Spin, PR firms representing the health insurance industry routinely furnished conservative pundits and so-called journalists with talking points their consultants developed to scare people away from reform.

The insurance industry has spent millions of our premium dollars over the years on linguistic research and message testing to assist it in disseminating false and misleading information to manipulate public opinion.

I devoted an entire chapter to the industry's "playbook." Here is one of the tactics I said included in the playbook:

Feed talking points to TV pundits and freaquent contributors to op-ed pages. They will know how to get talk show hosts with big audiences like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck to say things on the air to support your point of view and discredit your opponents.

This morning grassroots advocacy coalition Health Care for America Now asked its supporters to "reject Fox News and its attempts to continually attack the Affordable Care Act and the people who support it under the guise of legitimate 'reporting.'"

I am calling on Rupert Murdoch to fire Sammon, and I am calling on Fox's so-called journalists and the network's producers, many of whom I know and have worked with over the years, to denounce Sammon's partisan approach to reporting and commentary. I am further calling on them — and the news staff at the Wall Street Journal, also owned by Murcoch, to dedicate themselves to truly being "fair and balanced" and to familiarize themselves with the profession's code of ethics.

Northing short of our democracy is at stake here, folks.

[Cross-posted on PRWatch.org and Huffington Post.]

Over Thanksgiving week, the head of the global PR firm, Edelman, publicly complained about my tough critique of the damage the PR industry has done through campaigns that deceive consumers.

On the one hand, I was a bit surpised by Edelman's rather absurd claim that I had "no right to say" that big PR firms have a reputation for deceiving people, and that I should not have called into question the (profit) motive of PR practitioners who are really just "interested in the truth and in educating stakeholders about the issues of our time." After 30 years in the PR industry, I most certainly do have a right to call out the deceptive campaigns PR firms have orchestrated to obscure the truth and deceive the American public in the debate over health care reform and beyond. I detail these campaigns at length in my book, Deadly Spin, which is based on my own participation in just these practices.

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