The Making of a Health-Care Whistle-Blower

“In his testimony, former Cigna executive Wendell Potter outlined specific techniques insurers employ to "dump the sick" and protect stock price at all costs.” | Mark Wilson / Getty / Time

Kate Pickert, Time | Full Story | Wendell Potter may be the ideal whistle-blower. The former head of corporate communications for health-insurance giant Cigna, Potter turned against his old colleagues in June to testify before a congressional committee about what he viewed as the health-insurance industry’s "duplicitous" behavior in the current health-reform debate. In his testimony, Potter outlined specific techniques insurers employ to "dump the sick" and protect stock price at all costs. His testimony was logical, specific and convincing, but that’s only part of what makes Wendell Potter a perfect turncoat in the eyes of the pro-reform movement.

The other part is his manner. Before Congress, at subsequent pro-reform rallies around the country, and in the many television interviews Potter grants, he plays the role of the soft-spoken dad, calmly laying out his indictment of the for-profit insurance industry with a slight Tennessee twang, his gray hair buzzed and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He isn’t prone to hyperbole and, despite his having become a whistle-blower to "make amends" for the wrong he feels he did as a health-insurance executive, Potter is eerily calm, an island of serenity in the midst of the reform debate currently playing out at raucous town-hall meetings and amid charges of Nazism and racism. >>

Published 09.09.08 19:22:27 -0500 GMT | Posted by Andrew Garib on 09.09.10 | |