Michael Moore, PR & Health Insurers

It came to light last week how far health insurance companies would go to protect their scam system and huge profits. Whistleblower Wendell Potter has a new book, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans, about health care in America. Now the Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy, Potter was the chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA at the time Michael Moore announced his intention to take on health insurance. In an interview with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now last Wednesday, Potter details the health insurance industry’s reaction to Michael Moore’s film, “Sicko.” Potter reported that all the health insurance companies worked together in order to defeat Moore’s message. They sent a representative to the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 when the movie premiered. After that, they created a detailed response and a “very, very sophisticated communication campaign” to create the spin. The message was to “make sure that people… saw him as a Marxist, as a socialist, and that he was going to be destroying the American Dream,” according to Potter.

The health care industry was terrified of Moore’s movie. The insider at the premiere told the executives that the movie had received a 15 minute standing ovation and polling shortly after the movie’s release showed that for the first time since they began polling, that the majority of people were in favor of much greater government involvement in our healthcare system. In order to combat the movie and sway public opinion, the insurance giants funded a front group. Special interests and the insurance industry, in particular, would use premium dollars to funnel thousands and thousands, if not millions, of dollars to big PR firms to set up fake grassroots organizations. Does this sound familiar? Koch Industry and the Tea Party? In this case, there was a front group that was set up called Health Care America, and the sole purpose of it was to attack Michael Moore and to attack the notion of a single-payer system in this country.

The horrifying thing is that the front group worked and the mainstream media believed the group to be a real resource. The group was never exposed as being a front for the health care industry. Potter reports that the group was quoted extensively and was used as a source even from so-called reputable news outlets. In one example, the New York Times wrote an article about the movie premiering in the U.S. “And the New York Times story quoted the Health Care America spokesman as saying that this represented a move toward socialism. And there was not an—apparently not an attempt on the part of the reporter, or any reporter that I saw, to disclose the fact that this was funded largely by the insurance industry,” Potter reported. CNN was also scammed by the group, using the false numbers that the group provided.

Potter feels that the front group worked to some degree and contained the message. He stated that the insurance companies were afraid that Moore’s movie would be as successful as Fahrenheit 9/11 with disastrous results for the industry. He elaborated how important the PR campaign against Moore was. “At one point during a strategy meeting, one of the people from APCO said that if our efforts, our initial efforts, were not successful, then we’d have to move to an element of the campaign to push Michael Moore off a cliff.”

The idea that profit groups can infiltrate their message to the media is not new. This is just another blaring example of a commonplace issue. No one in the media tracked down who was funneling this innocuous sounding group, Health Care America. This is a great snapshot of why even seemingly impartial news stations are not impartial. Whether by design or by accident, the news that is reported to you each night has an agenda. My advice to you, question everything you read, hear, or watch. My advice to Michael Moore – make your next film about corporate media.