Quotes by Rose Aguilar

Wendell Potter is former head of corporate communications for CIGNA, one of the largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United States.

"If you are among those who believe that the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world--despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary-- it’s because my fellow spinmeisters and I succeeded brilliantly at what we were paid very well to do with your premium dollars.”

“And if you were persuaded that the health care bill President Barack Obama signed into law in March 2010 was a ‘government takeover of the health care system,’ my former colleagues and I earned every penny of our handsome salaries.”

The talking points [were] designed to be simple, catchy, and memorable. Think government takeover of healthcare, death panels, and socialism.

“And you have to say them over and over and over again. And if you hear them often enough, you think it’s true,” says Potter. “That’s why people, even today, think that the legislation created death panels. Obviously it never had anything approaching that kind of provision. People think this legislation is a government takeover of the healthcare system. In reality, it props up our private healthcare system. It guarantees that these private insurance companies are going to be profitable for years and years to come. It will require us to buy their products and it doesn’t include a public option, which we needed to have.”

Potter says once the talking points are written, they are distributed on Capitol Hill. The process is simple, but it’s done discreetly. “You don’t hand them to a member of Congress, but you develop very good relationships with staff members. That’s key.”

He says he also cultivated relationships with television producers and reporters, who, in turn, handed them to pundits and the talking heads on cable shows.