Healthcare Crisis: Profits vs. Patients

Amid the shocking assassination of a health insurance executive and an upswell of anger towards the country’s fragile health care safety net, the health insurance industry is suddenly facing a reckoning. Among the best experts to make sense of it all is Wendell Potter.

When Wendell Potter left his job as a public relations executive for a health insurance company he was sure of one thing: his former employer was harming people every day. Potter, a former vice president of the insurance giant Cigna, became a whistleblower over a decade ago, and though he does not condone the recent murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, he understands the fury many in the country feel towards the insurance industry. 

Today on Lever Time, Potter shares what he learned about how insurance companies hurt patients and more than a decade as an insurance industry insider. Journalist Jonathan Cohn, a veteran health care reporter and the author of the book The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage, also joins the show to unpack the decades-long political battle to reform the health care industry.