Health insurers have become expert at using P.R. to get what they
want. I got out before the latest round

Editor's note: Wendell Potter, formerly a communications officer for
the private health insurer Cigna, is now the Senior Fellow on Health
Care for the Center for Media and Democracy. He delivered the remarks
below at the Center for American Progress.

By Wendell Potter

It is easy to think of efforts to influence lawmakers as the exclusive
domain of K Street lobbyists. Much has been said and written about the
millions of dollars the special interests are spending on lobbying
activities and the hundreds of lobbyists who are at work as we speak
trying to shape healthcare reform legislation. Very little by
comparison has been written about the millions of dollars that special
interests are spending on P.R. activities to accomplish the same goal
and that are vital to successful lobbying efforts.

One of the reasons I left my job at CIGNA, where I headed corporate
communications and was part of the Legal & Public Affairs division,
was because I did not want to be involved in yet another P.R. and
lobbying campaign to kill or gut reform. I finally came to question
the ethics of what I had done and been a part of for nearly two
decades to influence decision making and bill writing on Capitol Hill.

When I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in late June, I
told the senators how the industry has conducted duplicitous and well-
financed P.R. and lobbying campaigns every time Congress has tried to
reform our healthcare system, and how its current behind-the-scenes
efforts may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far
more than average Americans. I noted that, just as they did 15 years
ago when the insurance industry led the effort to kill the Clinton
reform plan, it is using shills and front groups to spread lies and
disinformation to scare Americans away from the very reform that would
benefit them most. The industry, despite its public assurances to be
good-faith partners with the president and Congress, has been at work
for years laying the groundwork for devious and often sinister
campaigns to manipulate public opinion.

The industry goes to great lengths to keep its involvement in these
campaigns hidden from public view. I know from having served on
numerous trade group committees and industry-funded front groups,
however, that industry leaders are always full partners in developing
strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with insurers'
ability to increase profits. My involvement in these groups goes back
to the early '90s when insurers joined with other special interests to
finance the activities of the Healthcare Leadership Council, which led
a coordinated effort to scare Americans and members of Congress away
from the Clinton plan.

A few years after that victory, the insurers formed a front group
called the Health Benefits Coalition to kill efforts to pass a
Patients Bill of Rights. While it was billed as a broad-based business
coalition that was led by the National Federation of Independent
Business and included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Health
Benefits Coalition in reality got the lion’s share of its funding and
guidance from the big insurance companies and their trade
associations.

Like most front groups, the Health Benefits Coalition was set up and
run out of one of Washington’s biggest P.R. firms. The P.R. firm
provided all the staff work for the Coalition while an executive with
the NFIB, which has long been a close ally of the insurance industry,
served as a frontman.

One of the key strategies of the Health Benefits Coalition as it was
gearing up for battle in late 1998 was to stir up support among
conservative talk radio and other media. Among the tactics the P.R.
firm implemented for the Coalition was to form alliances with
important conservative groups, such as the Christian Coalition and the
Family Research Council, to get them to send letters to Congress or
appear at HBC press conferences. The Health Benefits Coalition also
launched an advertising campaign in conservative media outlets. The
message was that President Clinton owed a debt to the liberal base of
the “Democrat” Party and would try to pay back that debt by advancing
the type of big government agenda on healthcare that he failed to get
in 1994. The tactics worked. Industry allies in Congress made sure the
Patients’ Bill of Rights would not become law.

The insurance industry has funded several other front groups since
then whenever the industry was under attack. It formed the Coalition
for Affordable Quality Healthcare to try to improve the image of
managed care in response to a constant stream of negative stories that
appeared in the media in the late ‘90s and the first years of this
decade. It funded another group with a different name about the same
time when lawyers began filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of
doctors and patients. Like the Health Benefits Coalition, this one,
called America’s Health Insurers, was created by and run out of a
powerful Washington-based P.R. firm.

The insurance industry called on that same firm again in 2007 to help
blunt the impact of Michael Moore’s movie "Sicko." The P.R. firm
created and staffed a front group called Health Care America
specifically to discredit Moore and to demonize the healthcare systems
featured in the movie. The media contact for Health Care America was a
vice president at the firm who had served previously in P.R. roles at
the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and in the Bush administration.

The P.R. firm also activated conservative allies and enlisted the
support of conservative talk show hosts, writers and editorial page
editors to warn against a “government takeover” of the U.S. care
system. That is a term the industry uses often to scare people away
from any additional involvement of the government in healthcare.
Health Care America also placed ads in newspapers. One such ad, which
appeared in Capitol Hill newspapers, carried this message, "In
America, you wait in line to see a movie. In government-run health
care systems, you wait to see a doctor."

The P.R. firm’s work on behalf of the industry included feeding
talking points to conservatives in the media and in Congress and
placing columns and Op-Eds written for the industry’s friends in
conservative and free-market think tanks like the American Enterprise
Institute, Heritage, CATO, the Manhattan Institute and the Galen
Institute.
Quantcast

With this history, you can rest assured that the insurance industry is
up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious P.R. practices it
has used for many years, to kill reform this year, or even better, to
shape it so that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street
investors far more than average Americans.

The creation and funding of front groups and the use of shills on
Capitol Hill and in the media are not the only tactics P.R. people use
to support and enhance lobbying efforts. Other activities include, of
course, the implementation of grass-roots and grass-tops campaigns.
But a much more subtle tactic is to provide supposedly accurate and
objective information to “educate” members of Congress and their
staffs.

Business Week recently described how health insurers, United Health
Group in particular, have been hard at work behind the scenes
providing a treasure trove of data to key senators. If lawmakers
believe the information and date the insurers are feeding them is
comprehensive and objective, they are mistaken. Corporate
representatives, especially the P.R. people who work with the media
and who write talking points, are masters at the selective use of data
and disclosing only the information their employers want to be
disclosed.

What does this all mean for our country and our democracy?

During my 20 years in corporate communications and public affairs, I
participated in the steady growth and influence of largely invisible
persuasion -- and at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and
investigative journalism seems to be vanishing. The number of P.R.
people long ago surpassed the number of working journalists in this
country. And that ratio of P.R. people to reporters will continue to
grow. The clear winners as this shift occurs are big, rich
corporations and other special interests. The losers are average
Americans, most of whom are completely unaware how their thoughts and
actions are being manipulated to achieve corporate goals on Capitol
Hill

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/09/15/potter_pr/index.html

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