Wendell Potter Says "Take The Deal," Kucinich Says "No Way"

The Progressive:

Monday night on the Ed Schultz Show [1] former CIGNA V.P. and insurance-industry whistle blower Wendell Potter came out strongly for pulling together behind the imperfect health insurance reform legislation the President is trying to push through Congress.

Potter's take is significant, because he understands the details of health insurance policy, and the kinds of loopholes industry lobbyists manage to write into law.

As the President goes on his barnstorming tour to rally support for health care reform, I had been wondering about Potter's take on the current plan. Is it worth it, or is it, as Dennis Kucinich calls it, "a giveaway to the insurance industry"?

Back in September, I interviewed Potter when he came to Madison. He expressed worry that the health reform plan Obama was backing was turning out to be far less than it should be. "If he reverses himself on both the public option and the mandate requiring people to buy insurance, that will just be a gift to industry," he said.

The argument that we can’t start from scratch with a whole single payer system is "just bogus," he said. "The President has unfortunately been influenced by industry," Potter added.

Potter decried the wastefulness of the for-profit health-care system, with its enormous overhead and administrative expenses and profits for shareholders eating up one out of three healthcare dollars even as millions of people can't get the basic medical attention they need. Furthermore, he understands the specific ways industry looks out for its own interests.

"What we are seeing in this process is clearly enormous influence in the process by special interests. It’s especially apparent in the Senate," he said.

That influence is what gives us "benign-sounding things like 'flexible benefit design' – a loophole that makes premiums 'affordable.' " In practice, "flexible benefit design" means that industry can sell cheap coverage to healthy people that includes $20,000 deductibles, Potter explained. Anyone with that sort of plan who gets injured and has to go to the hospital will be bankrupted by the costs her insurer doesn't cover.

"Insurance companies will win one way or another," Potter told Schultz. "If it all falls apart," they get to keep the current system in which they can jack up rates and deny people needed coverage. If the Democrats pass health care reform, they get "30 million new customers," as the President put it. But the new regulations and restrictions the legislation will impose on the industry will mean a lot to people who are currently victims of outrageous industry practices, Potter says.

Among those restrictions are ending insurance companies' practice of denying coverage to people they deem to have pre-existing conditions, and setting up a regulatory panel that will look into how they spend premium money and impose certain benchmark standards--something Obama suggests would curb abuses like the sudden massive jump in premiums by WellPoint in California, which has used the money in part to pay bigger executive bonuses.

"We can't lose this opportunity," Potter said. "The insurance companies have too much money and clout in Congress." There is no guarantee this sort of regulatory opportunity will come up again, he said.

On the other side, Dennis Kucinich declared Monday night on Countdown [3], also on MSNBC, that he wouldn't mind being the lone vote to sink the Democrats' health care legislation.

"This bill represents a giveaway to the insurance industry," Kucinich told MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. "$70 billion a year, and no guarantees of any control over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance...I'm sorry, I just don't see that this bill is the solution."

As for building on this legislation to get to a better system, Kucinich said, "You're building on sand. . . . The insurance companies are the problem and we're just giving them a bailout," he said.

Instead, Congress should spend $70 billion on Medicare for more people--not on the insurance industry, which makes it's money by denying people health care coverage, Kucinich said.

It's a compelling argument, and one that Wendell Potter agrees with.

But Potter is less sanguine about the chances for a more satisfying version of national reform.

"This debate doesn’t come around often enough," he said back in September. "It takes years and years to build up. For eight years of Bush the White House had no interest in reforming the system because industry was in sync with the White House. I think it’s important to do whatever can be done. Let’s face it, Obama probably wouldn’t have been elected if he were a strong advocate for single payer. He wouldn’t have won the primary, let alone the general election."

Kucinich, who ran on single-payer in the last Presidential election, could surely understand that argument. But he is still holding out for what experts--and a majority of Americans--know is the right solution: a nonprofit health care system of the type you can find in every other country in the industrialized world.

The question is, how do we get there from where we are right now?