It’s the apology tour.
Wendell Potter, former head of communications for one of the largest health insurance companies in the United States, is telling Canadians he deliberately misled Americans about the Canadian health system to protect the U.S. status quo.
Potter was part of an April 14 stop in Lethbridge on the National Medicare Tour co-ordinated by the Canadian Health Coalition.
As a communicator first for medical insurance company Humana and then for Cigna, Potter said misleading Americans was key to a strategy that protected company profits.
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“We felt that if more Americans really did understand the Canadian system, they’d want what Canadians have and that would mean that the private insurance companies, over time, just would go out of business.
“I’m doing what I’m doing on this tour as somewhat of a tour of apology and making amends,” he said in an interview before his speech.
Potter said he is aware of suggestions in Canada that a more privatized health system would improve quality of care or reduce costs and waiting times. But in his view, that is a sure way to escalate costs.
“Don’t fall for that,” he said. “There’s this misunderstanding about how the so-called free market works in health care and it works, quite frankly, just the opposite of the way it works in most sectors of the economy.”
He said U.S. hospitals, which operate in the free market, spend millions on advertising to attract patients and duplicate services in efforts to increase their market share. The result is a virtual “arms race” among health-care facilities.
Along with that, health insurance companies focus on shareholder returns rather than patient care.
When he entered the health insurance business, Potter said he be-lieved companies could control medical costs and improve access. But the opposite occurred.
“I’m also here to disabuse folks of the notion that the free market, the private sector, can work wonders in health care. I know from experience that it is not a silver bullet but it can be a bullet that can really do a great deal of damage to the health-care system, because the free market does not work in health care like it does in other sectors of the economy. It actually operates the exact opposite.”
Michael McBane, CHC national co-ordinator, said the Canadian system is under threat particularly since the March 31 expiry of the national health accord.
The federal government’s apparent plans to withdraw leadership and give more health-care responsibilities to provinces will damage the system, he said.
“We’re really worried with the withdrawal of federal leadership in health care that we’ll see the system further fragment into basically 13 different pieces.”
Though some rural residents may think health-care service is poor, McBane said they should consider the alternatives.
“They don’t know what’s coming yet. They don’t know how good they have it if they think it’s bad now. It’s going to get a lot worse if we lose the federal government, we lose national standards, if we lose co-operation and co-ordination of care.”
The CHC is advocating for a national drug plan that would provide coverage for a wider range of drugs. Such a plan would allow bulk purchasing that would reduce costs by billions of dollars, said McBane.
Additionally, the CHS wants a national home-care plan and federal government commitment to cover 25 percent of national health-care costs.
“We have time to change the direction. We either get the government to change course, or we change governments.”
McBane told the meeting that health-care system changes proposed by the federal government are slated to be implemented only after the next election.
“Quite frankly, politicians are afraid to be seen to be attacking medicare, so they do it by stealth.
“They are making decisions which, over the long haul, will threaten our access to universal quality health care, regardless of where we live and regardless of our ability to pay.”
In a question and answer period, Lethbridge area resident Bev Muendel-Atherstone commended Potter for his apology, noting a member of her family who lives in California had “drunk the Kool-Aid” and now believes Canada’s system is in chaos.
Potter said his apology is based on a “crisis of conscience” experienced when he visited a Tennessee “health-care expedition” at which Americans lined up by the thousands, in pouring rain, to get free care from doctors, nurses and dentists who volunteered their time over one weekend.
“I made a pledge that day that I would have to figure out some other way to earn a living because I knew what I was doing was not right.”
He recalled market research de-signed to persuade Americans against massive health-care system changes, among them the oft-repeated “slippery slope toward socialism” campaign.
“We knew how to craft very brief phrases like that, to scare the bejesus out of them. And it worked. Many Americans just have no idea what your system is like, except what people like me told them.”
Potter said he and his insurance company colleagues got many of their talking points from the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute think-tank.
Changes to the U.S. health-care system, dubbed Obamacare, represent “the end of the beginning” of positive changes to the system, said Potter.
Now insurance companies can no longer charge more to cover the sick, or cancel existing coverage when people become sick. Recent studies show average medical care premiums for an American family are $16,351.
“Who has that kind of money?” he asked.
