Wendell Potter: Insurance Companies Want The Mandate Just Not ...

Yeah, this is pretty much what I thought, but it's still depressing to actually hear it from Wendell Potter. The insurance companies are just salivating at the thought of getting their hands on all those additional premium dollars - they just want to make sure there are as few consumer protections as possible so they get to keep most of the money instead of spending it on pesky things like patient care:

Wendell Potter spent 20 years as top executive with CIGNA. He wrote ?Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans?. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act - with a decision expected in June - the insurance industry whistleblower says the industry?s real goal is not to repeal the law, but to defeat Democrats in November.

Wendell Potter: ?They don?t want the bill - quite honestly - to be overturned or repealed. They want the bill to go forward with the individual mandate intact. But what they want to do is to get people to vote out the Democrats who voted for the bill so that they?ll have more friends in Congress to strip out the consumer protections.?

Potter says for-profit health insurers are killing health health care and their unsustainable system will implode within a few years. That?s the view he got from the CIGNA corporate ladder.

"The higher up that ladder I climbed the more I could see what these companies do to meet Wall Street?s profit expectations. And most of the big insurance companies are now for-profit companies. They cancel people?s health insurance when they get sick. They refuse to sell coverage to people who need coverage. They price policies so high that small businesses can no longer afford care. They are spending less and less of our premium dollars on our health care and more and more to reward shareholders and senior executives.?

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