The insurance flack who fled.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: 'Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans' - Book review

Deadly Spin

By Wendell Potter

Bloomsbury Press. 288 pages. $26.

I 've often wondered how people can front for RJ Reynolds, or ExxonMobil, or Massey Coal, or Goldman Sachs. If you consider yourself a decent person, it must take, at least at first, a lot of apologetics. After a while, I assume that self-delusion can be a comfort, and a hefty paycheck has been known to go a long way. And once you're ensconced in the upper reaches of these enterprises, I imagine it gets harder and harder to leave on principle.

But that's what Wendell Potter did, and we're a better country for it.

Potter is the guy who spent two decades as a top PR man for Humana and CIGNA, but finally got fed up with the cruelty of the private health insurance companies. After he quit, he went public, testifying before Congress in 2009 and getting a nod from President Obama in a speech to that body.

I've met Potter a couple times. He's a sweet, thoughtful, soft-spoken man, and that makes him all the more credible as a whistleblower.

Now he's telling all in a book called Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.

He starts off with a startling confession: "About 45,000 people die in America every year because they have no health insurance. I am partly responsible for some of the deaths making up that shameful statistic."

He reveals how he helped devise a strategy to defeat the Patient's Bill of Rights, how he sharpened the talking

points of the industry executives when they were denying people care, and how he set up groups "to promote the industry's political agenda."

The chapter on Sicko is particularly illuminating. He tells how petrified the industry was of Michael Moore's movie, so much so that in internal memos, corporate officers were told not to mention his name but to refer to him only as "Hollywood." Potter reveals that the insurance companies sent a representative to see the premiere in Cannes to know what they would be up against.

The PR guys from the biggest health insurance companies met to discuss how to respond to Sicko. The first step was to "position health insurers as part of the solution, not part of the problem," he writes. The second step was to recruit non-industry people to say that "Moore was a nut whose ideas on reform would be a disaster for the country."

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The goal of this part of the strategy, he writes, "was to make Moore radioactive to centrist...