Raw Story:Health 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.”
In the same segment, "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."
This is happening while health insurance enrollment has fallen. "Apparently while they quadrupled their profits, the number of Americans without health insurance grew by 19 percent," Maddow said. More money to be made, less money gets paid out... No wonder they want to protect the status quo.
I just cited Potter earlier today and now here he is again scraping away the whitewash. The guys deserves a freakin' medal.
