Wendell Potter: Translating the insurance industry's feel-good rhetoric (This is great!)

[antigop]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/translating-insurance-industrys-feel-good-rhetoric

Health insurers avoided their worst case scenario last week — the prospect of the Supreme Court striking down the individual mandate but letting the rest of the health care law, especially profit-threatening consumer protections, go forward. Now the industry can focus on a goal it has had all along: getting rid of those pesky consumer protections.

That goal was clear to me from the reaction statement issued by America’s Health Insurance Plans. The statement was jam-packed with feel-good phrases like “secure and affordable,” “peace of mind,” and “choice and competition.” Allow me to provide an interpretation of what AHIP, the industry’s biggest PR and lobbying group, was really saying and really planning. After twenty years as an industry PR guy, I’m all too familiar with prose written to obscure intentions.

Sentence by sentence, here’s what AHIP’s communications people crafted as soon as they realized the industry would not have to go nuclear to wipe out ObamaCare — that instead, it could conduct a stealth ground war to get rid of everything in the law that might threaten profits.

[freshwest]

1. Oh, yeah. In the immortal words of someone, 'This. Is. Not. Over!'

[Lefty Thinker]

2. I am so thankful he spoke up

Mr. Potter's expertise in cutting through the industry's PR doublespeak is a blessing for those of us who care about the world our children will inhabit.

[YOHABLO]

3. What About Our Message?

From now until ... eternity it seems, progressives are in constant battle to get the truth out, especially when it comes to the Health Insurance Monopoly. Yes, we have the good people at MSNBC, Bill Maher, Current TV, and let's not forget the wonderful progressive radio talk show hosts like Thom Hartman, Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, Bill Press etc.. even though the right wing talking heads still out number the left .. like three to one. Things being said like "affordable" and "secure" are such bullshit to anyone who has had to deal with these monsters. No one seems to quite understand what is going on until they become chronically ill and are on the phone, almost on a daily basis, with some well indoctrinated twit sitting in a cubical in Omaha Nebraska. Always with some "helpful" tone telling us that because they will not cover some procedure or medication that you can go through some appeals process that will take a month or more ... you know the deal. I live for the day that Health Insurance for profit will be eradicated. Let's just eradicate it altogether. This idea about "government" coming between you and your doctor .. who are they kidding? Maybe if more Americans would travel outside the U.S. and experience other country's health care systems, they'd get it.

[kenny blankenship]

4. You get it. I wish DU did as well

Half the good people you mention aren't half as good as you - nor half as good as you think they are.

"I live for the day that Health Insurance for profit will be eradicated. Let's just eradicate it altogether."

Anyone who disagrees with this, agrees that death should be the means for someone else's profit; and IMO that certain anyone is a fucking monster.

[midnight]

5. K&R