Who cares what some guy named Wendell Potter says? Anybody who's been paying attention to the healthcare reform debate, because Mr. Potter is a former industry insider, a former Cigna executive, who's guilty conscience has led to him to spill the beans about the worst of the industry practices.
Here's some of what he has to say about the Baucus debacle:
"The Baucus framework is just an absolute joke," said Potter, Cigna’s former head of corporate communications who has been speaking out against insurance industry practices. "It is an absolute gift to the industry. And if that is what we see in the legislation, (America’s Health Insurance Plans chief) Karen Ignagni will surely get a huge bonus."
(In case you're wondering, that would be a huge bonus would be in addition to some pretty amazing compensation: "Ignagni's total compensation, according to AHIP's most recent filing from 2007, was $1.58 million, which includes $700,000 in base salary, $370,000 in deferred compensation and a bonus.")
Back to Mr. Potter:
Potter said the proposal would not provide affordable coverage. It gives the industry too much latitude to charge higher premiums based on age and geographic location, fails to mandate employer coverage, and pushes consumers into plans with limited benefits, Potter said.
Private insurers "want to have ‘benefit design flexibility.’ Those are three very worrisome words," Potter said at a briefing arranged by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "By being able to have benefit design flexibility, they will be able to design plans that are so limited that more and more people will be in the ranks of the uninsured."
None of this comes as a surprise--Baucus is the best Democratic friend the industry has. That's who saw the draft of the bill first, and it's basically who wrote the thing in the first place.
So we know Max Baucus is representing his friends in industry instead of the American people. We'll see how the rest of the Senate Dems and the White House come down on this. It's a pretty basic question, formulated best by Howard Dean:
Who are you going to vote for, the people who sent you there and who pay your salary, or you`re going to vote for the health insurance industry?
