Wendell Potter

When members of Congress who led the effort to overhaul the U.S. health care system saw the public option slipping away, some of them suggested that a viable alternative would be the fostering of nonprofit health insurance CO-OPs (Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans) throughout the country.

I was among the...

We'll be hearing a lot from politicians this summer and fall about the urgency of dealing with Medicare spending, which will begin to rise sharply in the coming years as increasing numbers of the country's 75 million baby boomers turn 65.

If we're fortunate, some courageous candidates will call for...

You've heard it before. Let's deep six ObamaCare and replace it with a trio of sure-fire free-market solutions to the problems that plague our health care system. All that's really needed, we're told, is to pass tort reform, allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines and encourage people...

The recent news from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation that health insurers will have to send rebate checks totaling more than $1.3 billion to Americans this summer was especially gratifying to me. It more than justified my decision three years ago to clue members of Congress in on...

One of my responsibilities when I was head of corporate communications at Cigna was to help ensure that the company's annual meeting of shareholders ran smoothly and, if at all possible, attracted no negative publicity.

I always dreaded the annual meeting because you really never knew if one or more...

Want to find out what Congress is about to vote on? Take a ride on the Washington subway.

If you've been on the Metro in recent days, you might have seen an ad designed to make you feel sorry for our poor health insurance companies. So sorry that you'll call...

If there is a group of people more anxious about how the Supreme Court will rule on the health care reform law than President Obama and the millions of Americans who are already benefiting from it, it is health insurance executives.

Not only have their companies been spending millions of...

Since Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia clearly isn't going to take the time to actually read the health care reform law before he decides whether or not it's constitutional, maybe he and a couple of his buddies on the High Court can catch a screening of The Hunger Games, the...

Hands off my health care!

Remember those words from the health care reform debate of two years ago? I'm confident we'll be seeing them on protest signs in Washington again this week as the Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. And we'll see them...

As I was reading former Wall Street executive Greg Smith's bombshell of an Op-Ed in the New York Times last week, I mentally inserted the names of the big for-profit health insurers -- two of which I worked for -- in place of Goldman Sachs, where Smith worked...

If I were trying to persuade the Supreme Court later this month that Obamacare should not be declared unconstitutional, I would tell the story of the woman who was the original named plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by the National Federation of Independent Business, one of the fiercest critics of...

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini caused quite a stir when he said at a Las Vegas conference a few days ago that the insurance industry as we know it is, for all practical purposes, a dinosaur on the verge of extinction.

Time to sing, "Ding dong the witch is dead"? Not...

Recent news releases from two very different organizations paint entirely separate pictures of what can happen to people once they sign up for a high-deductible health plan.

One release from Cigna, the giant for-profit insurance firm I used to work for, would lead us to believe that human resource...

The biggest applause line Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) got at a gathering of Democratic Party activists last week came when she endorsed a ballot initiative to give the California Insurance Commissioner power to reject excessive health insurance rate increases.

Consumer advocates there decided to go the ballot initiative route after...

All the attention paid to the debacle about coverage for contraceptives over the past several days obscured a broader, undisputed win for all consumers, including those who are pregnant or about to be pregnant.

While the media was obsessing about the contraceptives controversy, the Department of Health and Human Services...

You can't see them. They're hidden from view and probably always will be. But the health insurance industry's big guns are in place and pointed directly at the citizens of Vermont.

Health insurers were not able to stop the state's drive last year toward a single-payer health care system, which...

"It shouldn't be this way," read the subject line of an email I received Friday morning from a conservative friend and fellow Southerner. "People shouldn't have to beg for money to pay for medical care."

At first, I thought he was referring to my column last week in which I...

In his State of the Union address this week, President Obama said very little about health care reform, but what he did say was a reminder of how tight a grip the insurance industry has on the U.S. health care system -- and will continue to have if the Affordable...

The journey I embarked on when I made the decision to leave a successful career in the health insurance business was a spiritual one. I can trace the decision to a true epiphany, to the very moment I saw hundreds of people standing, soaking wet, in long, slow-moving lines, waiting...