The Skimmer

Book review: Deadly Spin by Wendell Potter

By Kate Pickert Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
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    Deadly Spin

    Deadly Spin

    By Wendell Potter Bloomsbury Press; 277 pages

    Great p.r. flacks are as talented with misdirection as they are with the truth. There's no better recent example, says Potter, an insurance p.r. guru turned whistle-blower, than the health-insurance industry's stealth campaign to oppose Democratic health care reform. In Deadly Spin, a gripping indictment of his old bosses at insurance giant Cigna and of corporate p.r. pros everywhere, Potter exposes how corporations manipulate public opinion in the service of shareholders, forming front groups, touting misleading studies and enlisting sympathetic media types to further their causes. He should know, having tried to make Cigna look like an innocent bystander in the 2007 case of a girl who died after the insurer refused to pay for a liver transplant. The incident pushed Potter's conscience to a breaking point: "I had sold my soul," he writes. In short order, Potter quit Cigna and told Congress that despite their public stances, health insurers were secretly determined to deny care to sick patients in order to increase profits. There's not a p.r. person alive who could put a positive spin on that.

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