Whistleblower: Insurance firms ‘very much’ behind town hall disruptionsHealth insurance companies deserve “a great deal of the blame” for the sometimes violent disruptions to town hall meetings on health care, says a former health insurance company executive turned whistleblower.
Wendell Potter, a former executive with health insurer Cigna who now works as the senior fellow on health care at the Center for Media and Democracy, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that health insurance companies “are very much behind the town hall disruptions that you see and a lot of the deception that’s going on in terms of disinformation that many Americans, apparently, are believing.”
On her show Monday night, Maddow cited statistics from the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that profits at the US’s ten largest health insurance companies skyrocketed more than 400 percent between 2000 and 2007, from $2.4 billion in 2000 to $12.7 billion in 2007.
“Apparently while they quadrupled their profits, the number of Americans without health insurance grew by 19 percent,” Maddow said.
And she also pointed out that the average total take-home pay for the CEOs of those health insurance companies was $11.9 million each, per year, “while the number of Americans without health insurance, for whom a burst appendix can mean bankruptcy, has gone through the roof.”
Asked why health care costs are going up, Potter told Maddow: “Since 1983 … the amount of money that insurance companies take in in premiums — less and less of that is going to pay medical claims.”
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