Health Care Industry Abuses

Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Wendell Potter wrote an article about some of the abuses by the health care industry. It is pretty outrageous. It makes you wonder how the health care industry got to where it is today where the insurance companies call all of the shots. They set the prices, how much they will pay doctors and hospitals, and how much companies and individuals will pay for a policy. Costs have sky rocketed. When the health care bill was being crafted insurance companies played a huge role in the final outcome. They were responsible for removing the government option. Watch the Frontline about the push to reform health care to learn more about this.

Wendell Potter is a former Vice President of corporate communications at CIGNA, one of the United States' largest health insurance companies. In June 2009, he testified against the HMO industry in the U.S. Senate as a whistleblower. He is now the Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Frontline Report on the Health Care Reform Bill

On March 23, 2010, after a bruising year of debate, negotiation and backlash, President Barack Obama finally signed the health reform bill that he had promised more than a year before. But at what cost to his popularity and to the ideals of bipartisanship and open government that he'd campaigned on?

In Obama's Deal, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Bush's War, Dreams of Obama) takes viewers behind the headlines to reveal the political maneuvering behind Barack Obama's effort to remake the American health system and transform the way Washington works. Through interviews with administration officials, senators and Washington lobbyists, Obama's Deal reveals the dramatic details of how an idealistic president pursued the health care fight -- despite the warnings of many of his closest advisers -- and how he ended up making deals with many of the powerful special interests he had campaigned against.

View the Frontline Report.