Forbes.com Reviews Wendell Potter's New Book, "Deadly Spin"

Submitted by Anne Landman on

CMD's Wendell PotterDavid Whelan blogs about the health care business for Forbes.com, and he's published a review of Wendell Potter's forthcoming new tell-all book about the health insurance industry, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. After twenty years as head of corporate public relations for two of the country's biggest for-profit health insurers, Wendell gave up his six-figure salary and cushy life as an insurance executive and decided he had to start telling people how the for-profit insurance industry manipulates the government and sticks it to Americans.

Apparently too excited about Deadly Spin to wait until he's read the entire thing, Whelan is giving a blow-by-blow review of the book as he reads it. His September 17 blog covers the first half of the book, in which Wendell describes his life inside the industry and how he got disillusioned with it, the "skimpy" products insurance companies push on subscribers and gives a glimpse into his awakening -- the moment at which he realized what the industry was doing was wrong and was harming the country.

Wendell has been called the health insurance industry's "worst nightmare," so naturally we are proud to have him here at CMD. Pre-publication copies of the book have been sent out to health writers. The book won't be available to the general public until November 9, but copies can be pre-ordered at a discount at Amazon.com.

If the pre-publication reviews are any indication, it could be quite a transformational work.

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magiart replied on

I eagerly await my pre-ordered copy of Wendell Potter's book. The people of this country live in advertiserss confabulations about the corporations that are undermining and swindling them...and don't wake up until they are permanently traduced and knocked silly by Insurance companies in general and specifically Health Insurance Giants. This book, the perspective of a 'converted' insider whose better nature was probably appaled and repulsed by the bottom-line only manipulative mentality of these inhuman insurance giants, will serve to remove many more blinders of debility from people's eyes. We all must at last shake off the thrall these predators after vulnerable psychic victims hold us in. Their insatiable greed and an absence of any genuine concern for customers they lure into their health care product webs of deceit needs to be addressed by laws that can, if they bear real teeth, stop their vampiric practices. Big Insurance brags about its immense profits as though these were not generated from the extraction of overpriced premiums from millions of people who were gulled by advertisers' fear tactics, into parting with their money for the illusory security about health they poffered. And, in health emergencies, when their services were counted on, many people were denied because they did not read the fine print that should have been in bold letters in their 'product' contracts. From original and over priced premiums which are then gambled on Wall Street, Big Insurance buys costly advertising, retains legal services, investigative services, etc,...to legally use those premiums against the very people who paid them... Hopefully, Mr. Potter's book will open many more eyes...and lead to an unravelling of this Big Insurance conspiracy against the American people.