Insurance Companies Are Terrified of Medicare For All

FEATURING WENDELL POTTER – Financial publications are in a tizzy over the falling stock prices of private health insurance corporations, using terms like “free fall” to describe the trend. The debate over a Medicare-for-All program is largely to blame for the falling stocks. The idea that everyone could get healthcare through the government has terrified companies like UnitedHealthcare which was recently revealed to be quietly lobbying against it.

Most Democratic Presidential contenders have jumped on the Medicare for All bandwagon in a testament to how popular the idea is – another fact that has insurance companies worried.

Wendell Potter, author and journalist who spent more than two decades in the health insurance industry, at Humana and Cigna. He became a whistleblower in 2008 when he left Cigna and wrote the tell-all book Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. Since then he also wrote Obamacare: What’s In It for Me/What Everyone Needs to Know about the Affordable Care Act; and Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It.