It was beautiful the day we marched from Long Beach to Sag Harbor’s Marine Park to rally for Health Care Reform. We marked the sunny Saturday over the Labor Day weekend with our banner, flags and posters held aloft in a gentle breeze. Two to four abreast, a long trailing line of about 50 marched inside the left-hand shoulder of the road, the bay to our side a gorgeous, peaceful presence. Kids with their parents and adults of all ages marched along with different strides soon coalescing into one rhythm. A bicyclist peddling east to west, turned around, got off their bike and walked with us awhile. Our banner was our prayer. It read: “With Liberty, Justice and Healthcare for all.”  Our posters were our judgments of where we’re at: “I’m sick of waiting for Healthcare Reform.”…“High Price. High Co-Pay. Arbitrary Denial of Benefits.”… “Just Say No to the Status Quo.”…“Health Insurers Practice Medicine Without a License.”… 

Many of the cars and trucks we met along the way saluted us with approving honks, their passengers giving us the thumbs up.  Barely anyone gave us the thumbs down. Passing Bay Point we were greeted by high-spirited squeals and cheers from several kids waving from the windows of a house overlooking Long Beach. Their excited childish voices and laughter was musical and sweet, our better angels. We waved back. All very warm and neighborly. What a contrast to a “town hall” meeting I’d attended at a high school auditorium in Brookhaven the week before. That was ugliness uncorked. As a veteran of many town hall meetings and of government hearings of every stripe—local, county and federal—it made my skin crawl. Even at meetings with feelings and disappointments running high, I had never witnessed anything like it. Even at a huge venue like the “Broadwater” hearing—with 800 strong—when it was clear the Federal Energy Commission was just going to thumb its nose at the public we remained respectful. People may have groaned and moaned, but no one ever got demonstrative, rude, or spoke out of turn. No one ever harangued or went out-of-bounds towards a board, official or another audience member. It always remained civil. In fact, if anyone ever got obstreperous or obnoxious, it was the rest of the audience who would disown that sort of behavior and shout down the perpetrator telling him to be quiet and sit down. Self-policing and decency are the norm. Here, we had instances of people with angry, twisted faces shouting down others whose turn it was to speak. It was appalling. I noticed these rules of politeness started to break down during last year’s primary when Sarah Palin breezed onto the campaign trial. It got so bad that even McCain reacted and had to scold some out-of-bounds lady so bamboozled was she by the orchestrated hate mongering against Obama.

It took Wendell Potter, a veteran insider of the health insurance industry to confirm what many of us suspected—big industries (health insurers, drug, energy, tobacco, agri-business) wage highly orchestrated PR wars against the unsuspecting public to their own ends. Potter is the former vice president of corporate communications at CIGNA. Now he’s a whistleblower. To the industry’s horror, he’s been making media rounds and public appearances revealing all manner of dirty tricks insurers use to bamboozle and defraud the public; the latter by denying benefits so they can add it to their fat profits. Potter has forgone his lucrative career as CIGNA’s head PR person to speak out against the industry. He said he didn’t mean to “until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they’ve used over the years, and particularly in the early ‘90s when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan.”

He had an epiphany when he witnessed hundreds of desperate people, many without health insurance, who’d come from miles around, lining up in the rain waiting to get some free health care at a makeshift clinic in animal stalls at a fairgrounds. He’s testified before the Senate and is now with the Center for Media and Democracy speaking out about the need for both a “fundamental overhaul of the American health care system and on the dangers to American democracy and society of the decline of media as watchdog which has contributed to the growing and increasingly unchecked influence of corporate PR. Much to the disquiet of the Health Insurance Industry he has been giving many public interviews, including those with Times, Bill Moyers, Think Progress, explaining how health insurers derail reform so as to preserve the status quo.  He has made public mea culpas for his direct role in the past to defeat legislation to regulate insurers, in campaigns aimed at dampening and minimizing public outrage at insurance companies’ abuses, and in the “massive effort to discredit Michael Moore and his movie, SICKO…” an exposé and take-down of the health insurance industry.

   As an insider (now considered a turncoat), Potter explains how insurance giants, Wellpoint, United Healthcare, CIGNA (who make billions in profits) use a lobbyist-organized “duplicitous” two-pronged campaign to kill reform. One a “charm” daylight campaign where they pose as reformers, while simultaneously running an underground “dirty” campaign aimed at undermining reform. In the charm campaign they spend millions in ads to kill the public option (an incredible $32 million to date), send their CEOs on TV to argue for limited reform, have their lobbyists make false promises to the public and Congress, finance “Think Tanks” to crank out reports seeking to limit reform by misleading the public about legislation. One of these, the “Lewin Group,” owned by United Healthcare, is often quoted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) a pro-insurance voice on the Senate Financial Committee who has worked in overdrive to sink reform.

Working to charm the public, Health Insurers have been coercing employees and hoodwinking customers into attending town halls with “talking points” to limit and derail reform. They also send out false talking points and fear-mongering mailers to their customers directing them to sign up at websites with innocent sounding names, which are in fact run by a tobacco lobbying firm.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, insurers work their dirty campaign to kill reform by (a) providing talking points and scare tactics to a variety of right-wing media; (b) working with partisan lawmakers in Congress to obstruct, water-down, and kill reform bills; (c) coordinate with ideological Think Tanks on the right to produce reports aimed at killing reform; (d) funnel money to front groups through public relations firms (that service the tobacco industry) so that the front groups can run ads, storm town halls and organize anti-reform rallies. These front groups (Astroturf’s) with names like “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights,” “FreedomWork” pretend to be grassroots groups.

Which brings me back to the town hall at a Brookhaven high school; an event moderated by the League of Women Voters and where Rep. Tim Bishop fielded questions. There were about 500 people there. It was held a few weeks after Bishop’s particularly nasty town hall and the public consequently found out about the insurance industry’s hand in it—stirring the pot at Tim’s and at other town halls across the country during the August break, and planting “provocateurs” throughout the audience to make it look “spontaneous.” These people ambushed the congressman, disrupted other citizens and hogged speaking time for themselves.

At Brookhaven, while those who supported healthcare reform turned out in force to hear Bishop and wanting to be heard having been drowned out before, the noise level and disruption came from those in opposition to reform. It was uncalled for. It was concerted.

What I witnessed that night was ugly, ruthless, rude, frightening intimidation. Disrespectful, not only to Tim Bishop, to the League of Women Voters who were the moderators trying to handle this mob, and to the Brookhaven supervisor who introduced Tim, but…to the dead. Ted Kennedy had died two days before. When, in his introduction, the supervisor said some words in respect of the passing of Kennedy, the vitriol spewing against Kennedy from certain people calling out from their seats, disrupting, even drowning out the supervisor as he spoke, was unprecedented. It went from bad to worse. But I have to say, Tim Bishop handled himself in a dead-on straight manner. It was his finest hour; I was both impressed and proud at how he conducted himself in the face of that lynch-mob mentality. He had the facts at hand. He never lost his cool.

  A woman who sat in the front row, asked to borrow a big poster I’d brought. It said: “Layoffs = Lost Health Insurance.” When the LWV moderator called her turn to speak she took it to the podium and told the audience she’d arrived early that day, because she felt it was so important she get her chance to speak. Whereupon a woman sitting right in back of me yelled: “Get a life!” She and her male companion had been making it their business to take a photo of every single person who spoke at the podium, and of those, like myself, who had signs supporting reform.

 The woman at the podium then spoke of her son who was married with three children. He’d been laid off and lost his health insurance. He has Crohn’s disease and couldn’t afford COBRA, couldn’t even afford his medications anymore. While working, he had been in remission. Without health coverage, his condition deteriorated. What was the point, she asked, of the government now having to pay for her son, his wife and three kids now having to go on welfare when, if we’d had health reform and healthcare was available to him, he could be well and have found another job and kept working to support his family.

After our Labor Day weekend rally in Marine Park, where we heard several speakers, one who had been a hospital administrator, two others, physicians, I waited by the road across from the American Legion waiting for my ride home. A family of three was about to get in their car parked by the restaurant when the man, a day tripper, saw my sign, “Health Insurers Dump the Sick” that I’d left leaning on a tree. I could see him discussing it with his son and wife. He came across the street with his adult son and wanted to know about my sign. I explained about our rally and he wanted to know if there was a petition he could sign for the “public option.” He told me he was a dentist, had developed bad rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t hold his instruments any more. That his premiums for he and his wife had jumped last year, and now yet again to $24,000. I directed him to the signing table and off he and his son went, thanking me profusely.

If you want to find out about insurers dirty tricks to derail health reform, I suggest you google “Wendell Potter” the health insurance insider the industry doesn’t want you to know about.

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