One story that we couldn’t keep out of the press and that contributed most to my decision to walk away from my career in 2008 involved Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient in California whose scheduled liver transplant was postponed at the last minute when Cigna told her surgeons it wouldn’t pay. Cigna’s medical director, 2,500 miles away from Ms. Sarkisyan, said she was too sick for the procedure. Her family stirred up so much media attention that Cigna relented, but it was too late. She died a few hours after Cigna’s change of heart.
Ms. Sarkisyan’s death affected me personally and deeply. As a father, I couldn’t imagine the depth of despair her parents were facing. I turned in my notice a few weeks later. I could not in good conscience continue being a spokesman for an industry that was making it increasingly difficult for Americans to get often lifesaving care.
One of my last acts before resigning was helping to plan a meeting for investors and Wall Street financial analysts — similar to the one that UnitedHealthcare canceled after Mr. Thompson’s horrific killing. These annual investor days, like the consumerism idea I helped spread, reveal an uncomfortable truth about our health insurance system: that shareholders, not patient outcomes, tend to drive decisions at for-profit health insurance companies.
What a frustrating article. We have an author that admits to being part of an effort to decrease access to healthcare and refers to the death of a monster in a human suit as a tragedy. He also admits he fucked up and has gone on to work with organizations that advocate for the right to healthcare.
I think I’m frustrated with this piece because it feels so lukewarm. Maybe that’s by design so that it reaches a wider audience. I’m just tired of seeing the insurance industry and its executives handled with kid gloves. It is unambiguously evil to make the kind of money they make off of healthcare.
He cannot escape in his narrative that he got his. He did the damned work and was able to move on with his conscious. He quit, the company replaced him, nothing fundamentally changed. He feels better, kids still dead.
The article isn’t a tale of redemption: it is about deflecting blame from executives to shareholders.
Which is just a subtle way of portraying a publicly traded company as less desireable than a fully privatized company that apparently would make different decisions about how to profit off dying people.
And yet he still calls the death of Brian Thompson “tragic.”
The death of a mass murderer is cause for celebration.
I hate this “He had a family that loved him!”
Because while I’m sure that’s true… ya know who else had families that loved them?
The various people who died of treatable illness because this assclown denied the healthcare THAT THEY PAID INTO in order to save a couple of dollars despite wiping his ass with Benjamins on the regular.
To his co-workers, Brian Thompson was just another suit and tie who punched out at 5 and met up with the boys for drinks before seeing the Mrs.
To his customers, he was the man responsible for the deaths of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters.
Ban For-Profit healthcare
Stalin and Hitler had families too, doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop being happy they dead
It is tragic that it takes an assassination to bring the deplorable condition of our healthcare system to the front of the public consciousness, and also tragic if that’s what it takes to effect change. The karmic justice itself doesn’t have to be tragic for the event to be “tragic”.
it took an impromptu visit to a free medical clinic, held near where I grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee, to come face to face with the true consequences of our consumerism strategy.
At a county fairground in Wise, Va., I witnessed people standing in lines that stretched out of view, waiting to see physicians who were stationed in animal stalls. The event’s organizers, from a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical, told me that of the thousands of people who came to this three-day clinic every year, some had health insurance but did not have enough money in the bank to cover their out-of-pocket obligations.
That shook me to my core. I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I was playing a leading role in a system that made desperate people wait months or longer to get care in animal stalls or go deep into medical debt.
I’m gunna go out on a limb and predict this guy doesn’t get shot unless he goes hunting with the Cheneys regularly.
The only good exec is an ex-exec.
Thankfully, since this one retired of his own volition, it is no longer necessary to retire him.
TBF he is still an exec. Just not an insurance exec.
Wendell Potter, a former vice president for corporate communications at Cigna, is the president of the Center for Health and Democracy and writes the newsletter “Health Care Un-Covered.”
The Center for Health and Democracy(CHD) is a non-profit organization led by renowned healthcare expert and insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter that works to transform America’s system of health coverage. The organization’s core belief is that healthcare should be driven not by industry profits and greed, but by the needs and rights of every American to get the quality care they need without concern for cost.
Your whole argument that every execs deserve to die got disproved as you can not generalize like everyone as part of this group and your response that this Individuum is like the one to get an exception? How does killing executives change anything? In the current system its a post that needs to be filled and in don’t think its an outrageous statement to say self-justice and murder shouldn’t be used unless they’re last resort and its not like a CEO is the owner of a company that can do whatever they want to steer it. Although they have quite a bit of leeway
