Former CIGNA executive: Current Healthcare system is a giant ATM for Wall Street investors

(About the video: BraveNewFilms & Chris Bowers (OpenLeft) interviews Wendell Potter, “a former insurance executive comes clean about industry practices designed to kick the sick off the rolls and rip off patients to make obscene profits”.)

The Health Care Industry vs. Health Reform

Source: Wendell Potter , Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy

I’m the former insurance industry insider now speaking out about how big for-profit insurers have hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street investors, and how the industry is using its massive wealth and influence to determine what is (and is not) included in the health care reform legislation members of Congress are now writing.

Although by most measures I had a great career in the insurance industry (four years at Humana and nearly 15 at CIGNA), in recent years I had grown increasingly uncomfortable serving as one of the industry’s top PR executives. In addition to my responsibilities at CIGNA, which included serving as the company’s chief spokesman to the media on all corporate and financial matters, I also served on a lot of trade association committees and industry-financed coalitions, many of which were essentially front groups for insurers. So I was in a unique position to see not only how Wall Street analysts and investors influence decisions insurance company executives make but also how the industry has carried out behind-the-scenes PR and lobbying campaigns to kill or weaken any health care reform efforts that threatened insurers’ profitability.

Fighting the Food Oligarchy, Why is Monsanto’s Fox Guarding the Henhouse?

“The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand”  Food,Inc.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you had to read something twice for it to sink in because it was that unbelievable? Well prepare yourself for one of those moments courtesy of Sustainable Food’s, Natasha Chart.

She writes:

Obama’s considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.

As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.

Everyone who’s read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.

As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn’t have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.

So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.

This guy is heading up a food safety working group.

I’m just swimming in the changeiness.

It will take more than a “ShamWow” to wipe away the affects of this swim “in the changeiness”. Truth is the consumer,  small farmer, organic farmer and local farmer’s markets have already had their share of “changeiness” since Obama took office. Between proposed legislation that strengthens the corporate industrial food complex’s grip on our food supply, like H.R 2749 & H.R.875 , the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) which threatens traditional rural farming and now Monsanto’sTaylor’s FDA appointment, the only conclusion one can reach is we are in the fight of our lives against industrial agriculture, corporate special interest and the kool-aid sipping status quo.

Fighting the Food Oligarchy