Fifteen Years Ago Today I Became a Whistleblower

June 24, 2009, was the day I somehow found the courage to speak truth to power, truth my former colleagues and I had been able to obscure for years. Disgusted with what I was paid well to do over two decades – mislead lawmakers, employers, the media and the public – I had walked away from my career in Big Insurance several months earlier. That itself was life-changing, but at least I hadn’t burned any bridges. I knew that by the time I finished testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee that day, every bridge I had crossed in my career would be in cinders. 

I had been VP of Corporate Communications at Cigna. I was the company’s chief spokesman. My name was on every one of Cigna’s quarterly earnings reports for 10 years. My team and I wrote talking points and white papers for our lobbyists to use to persuade lawmakers that health insurers were the guys in white hats, always working in good faith to make health care affordable and accessible for all Americans. We were very good at what we did.

My team and I also handled what we called “horror stories,” and we always had plenty of them. We had a horror story on our hands when a reporter would call asking why Cigna wouldn’t pay for care that could save a patient’s life. I lost track of how many we handled over the years. But when 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan died after Cigna refused to cover her liver transplant, I couldn’t in good conscience continue being a spokesman for an industry that I knew operated what for all practical purposes were death panels. My departure from the company was announced as a retirement. I was 56.

Another reason I quit was because I also could not in good conscience keep participating in behind-the-scenes, industry-funded campaigns to defeat any health care reform proposals we didn’t like, and the industry didn’t like what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were saying on the campaign trail. Obama in particular kept talking about establishing a “public option” to compete with private insurers “to keep them honest.” They both said they’d make some of the industry’s most egregious business practices illegal.

Watch my testimony

After I quit, I reached out to health care reform advocates and offered to clue them in on the industry’s strategy to defeat any reforms the Democrats proposed that might reduce profits. I wanted to stay anonymous. I had been a part of an effort in 2007 to discredit and disparage Michael Moore and his movie Sicko and I didn’t want my old industry to come after me.

For the first few months of 2009, sweeping reform seemed inevitable. Soon after he was inaugurated in January, Obama made health care a priority, and he believed reform enjoyed such broad public support that it could be done on a bipartisan basis. So did Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who chaired the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus appointed what came to be called the “Gang of Six” – three Democrats and three Republicans – to come up with reforms both parties could support.

But after months of meetings, the gang couldn’t agree on much of anything. It became clear that Republicans didn’t want to hand the Democrats a victory, and even some Democrats – especially the moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats who represented swing districts – were wavering because of the relentless fear-mongering campaign financed by health insurers. We would learn later that AHIP (previously known as America’s Health Insurance Plans), the industry’s big lobbying and PR group, had secretly funneled more than $100 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to fund the Chamber’s ads that claimed the Democrat’s bill would amount to a “government takeover of health care.”

Reform advocates were sensing that momentum was shifting and that the reform was in peril. The folks at Health Care for America Now, the lead advocacy group pushing for reform, came to me and said that if I sincerely wanted to be of help, if I wanted to make a difference, I would need to go public with what I knew and what I used to do for a living. And they had a forum in mind for my premiere as a whistleblower: a Senate hearing, which would be chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).

I reluctantly agreed to at least talk with the committee staff. It was more of a grilling than a conversation. They wanted to be sure I knew what I was talking about and would be a credible witness.

Another advocate, John Stauber, who had founded the Center for Media and Democracy, introduced me to Bill Moyers. I took the train up to New York to meet Moyers and his team. They also grilled me for a good two hours. At the end of it, they told me that if I testified, they’d send a crew to DC to film it. 

A few days later I got an invitation in the mail from the committee inviting me to testify as part of a panel that would also include Karen Pollitz, now with the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Nancy Metcalf, then senior health editor at Consumer Reports. 

Here is a link to my testimony. I’ll write more later this week about whether anything I talked about was addressed in what came to be known as Obamacare.