20230206 Nicole Sandler Show - Wendell Potter, Prior Authorizations and Govt Sanctioned Extortion

The "Government-sanctioned extortion" line is mine... it's what I call the for-profit health insurance industry. Think about it. You have to pay them in order to get the prices they've negotiated for medical care of every stripe. If you don't have insurance, you're charged the "list price," but if you pay your monthly extortion to cabal, then the cost for services is what those two entities negotiated. The bottom line is you'll pay, one way or the other. I used to dream of crawling across the line of 65... you know, when I'll be eligible for Medicare. I understood that the current process of insurance companies deciding what treatment you'll get instead of relying on the actual doctor to make those calls wasn't an issue when you were able to get the actual government-supplied Medicare. And it was, until the advent of so-called Medicare *Advantage*. Today, Wendell Potter [http://twitter.com/wendellpotter]returns to the show. Potter, still the only health insurance industry employee to turn whistleblower to expose these extortionists for the crooks they are, testified before NYC's Committee on Civil Service and Labor against Mayor Eric Adams' decision to move NY's public worker retirees into an Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan. He opened his testimony by repeating "Medicare Advantage is neither Medicare nor is it an advantage for millions of Americans." Be sure to subscribe to Wendell's newsletter at wendellpotter.substack.com [https://wendellpotter.substack.com/] And now, after a devastating report from Pro Publica, Potter is turning his sites on the unreasonable and dangerous "prior authorization" requirement that is actually killing patients... And at the end, I'll have a few words to share about the Grammys, which I didn't watch, but now wish I had....