The gunning down of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has busted open an often-angry conversation about the state of health insurance in the United States, and now, an ex-exec with one of the country's biggest insurers is adding fuel to that fire. "What I saw made me quit," notes Wendell Potter in his op-ed for the New York Times, revealing that he ditched his role as Cigna's VP for corporate communications "after a crisis of conscience." For years, Potter said he "[drank] the Kool-Aid" on his company's "consumerism" strategy, an approach that arose in 2005 "to persuade employers and policymakers to shift hundreds, and in many cases thousands, of dollars in health-care costs onto consumers before insurance coverage kicks in." The goal: "Proponents contended that if patients had more 'skin in the game' they would be more prudent consumers of health care," he writes.
That, in turn, would lead to lower prices from providers—or at least that was the thinking at the time, per Potter, who says he felt "uneasy" after first hearing about the direction the company was taking. That unease was cemented when Potter visited a free annual medical clinic in Virginia, where organizers told him that of the thousands of people who showed up for it each year, some couldn't cover their out-of-pocket medical expenses even with health insurance. "That shook me to my core," he writes. The murder of Thompson has now "reinvigorated" the conversation "that my former colleagues have long worked to suppress about an industry that puts profits above patients," Potter notes. After 20 years in the industry, Potter left Cigna in 2008. (More here, including on Potter's experiences at Cigna, and the death of a teen leukemia patient that influenced his decision to finally resign.)
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