Orshe

A guy who spent his career working for health-insurance companies went up to Capitol Hill today and unloaded on his former industry.

Here’s how he kicked off his testimony (online here) to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation:

My name is Wendell Potter and for 20 years, I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies, and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick –- all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.

Potter, who worked for many years as a spokesman for Cigna and before that was at Humana, described the pressure within companies to meet targets for earnings and the medical-loss ratio. Now Potter is the senior fellow for health care at a nonprofit called the Center for Media and Democracy.

In his testimony, he went on to argue in favor of a public-health plan. Then he closed with this:

But what we have today, Mr. Chairman, is a Wall Street-run system that has proven itself an untrustworthy partner to its customers, to the doctors and hospitals who deliver care, and to the state and federal governments that attempt to regulate it.

We asked for comment from Cigna and the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans but neither gave us an immediate response. We’ll update this post when we hear back from them.

Update: Here’s a statement from AHIP:

We continue to be focused on advancing comprehensive health care reform that addresses the health care concerns we heard from the American people. Our community has proposed overhauling the market rules and enacting new consumer protections so nobody is left out, simplifying health care choices for individuals and small businesses, and reforming the delivery system to improve the quality and affordability of health care coverage.

Cigna Bonus: In other Cigna news, the company’s chairman and CEO will retire at the end of this year, after which those two titles will be split. Here’s the Dow Jones Newswires story.

Photo: Associated Press

Original post: 
Former Exec: Insurers ‘Confuse Their Customers,’ ‘Dump the Sick’