A former health insurance executive turned watchdog says the federal healthcare law will help people … many of whom insurance companies have turned their backs on. Wendell Potter was an executive with Humana and Cigna for 20 years. Now he’s a consultant, and he’s talking to Missourians about Obamacare.
“It’s going to take time,” he says. “I don’t think anyone really should expect that everyone who doesn’t have insurance are going to automatically sign up at the first of the year. I do think though that the vast majority of people do want to have coverage, they want to have insurance because they understand that they’re vulnerable otherwise.”
Potter says dispelling the myths is putting people at ease.
“I think that over time, this will become the new norm,” he says. “It’s still very politicized, which has so many people confused. But the same thing happened back in the sixties when the medicare law was passed.” “There was a of opposition leading into the enactment of that law, after the implementation of it. But now it is now such a apart of our society that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like without Medicare …I think we’ll find that’ll be the case. There will be so many consumer protections in this law, that people will come to understand how it protects them, how valuable it is. We’ll ask, ‘how did we ever wait so long to get this law into place?'”
He says the truth is: insurance companies have consistently dropped services and offered less for more to protect their profit margin. His topics this week center on what opportunities the new health coverage offers, what insurance companies are doing to maximize profits now, and how some employers will try to avoid providing adequate coverage.
State exchanges must be set up by this October, and mandated coverage goes into effect next January.
