A 21st-century Christmas Carol: How one Scrooge became a health-care whistleblower

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Former health-care executive Wendell Potter spent part of 2020 publishing high-profile apologies for the lies he says he told the American people in his old job—and trying to debunk the myths he once sold. The story of how he became a whistle-blower is a modern-day Christmas Carol. And it's a story about the long, messy process of change—whether that’s changing your own life or trying to change a bigger system.

It’s a great way to close out a pretty-terrible year.

Another cheerful note: THANK YOU!!! Your support for this show has MAXED OUT the matching program NewsMatch. It’s a huge, huge boost for our work in 2021.

Of course, we could still use your support before the year ends. We would love it. There is SO much work ahead.

AND, if you’re looking for other places to help out, here are a few places doing powerful work:

Remote Area Medical runs free pop-up clinics— and seeing one played a role in Wendell Potter’s move from Scrooge to whistle-blower.
Get Us PPE helps front-line workers get the personal protective equipment they need to stay safe during the pandemic. (And yep, that is still a thing. Grrr…)
RIP Medical Debt pools money to buy up old medical debt and forgive it. By doing bulk transactions, they can take a $5 donation and use it to discharge $500 in debt. (We featured their work in a 2019 episode, Christmas in July.)
MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism does powerful investigative reporting. After they exposed how the biggest hospital in Memphis was suing patients over unpaid bills, the hospital was shamed into dropping thousands of lawsuits and erasing almost $12 million in debt.

And of course it is absolutely not too late to support this show. Here’s that link: https://armandalegshow.com/support/

Send your stories and questions: https://armandalegshow.com/contact/ or call 724 ARM-N-LEG

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, I've got kind of a holiday story for you. I thought we'd sneak it in before the year ended.
0:05.0	You may have seen an essay or two floating around the internet this year along the lines of,
0:09.0	if you think health care in Canada is worse than in the US. Uh, I'm really sorry.
0:14.0	I'm the guy who sold you that big fat lie.
0:17.0	The author is Wendell Potter, and he was in charge of communications
0:20.0	for Cigna for a long time,
0:22.0	for most of the 90s and aughties and then about a dozen years ago he went rogue
0:27.2	left that job became a whistleblower this year that meant writing a couple of op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
0:34.4	Both of them are part of my work to make amends for what I used to do for a living,
0:39.3	which was in many cases to mislead people into thinking that we have the best health care
0:43.4	system in the world. You may have an opinion about the Canadian health care
0:47.4	system and you think that way because of the work that I used to do. I talked with them
0:52.0	last summer and it was a super interesting
0:54.1	conversation but I wasn't exactly sure what to do with it or when like what was the
0:58.9	occasion what was the lesson for right now and then a few weeks ago I thought, oh, Wendell Potter's story is a
1:05.9	version of a Christmas Carol. Only when you dig in it is messier and way more interesting.
1:13.0	This is an arm and a leg, show about the cost of health care.
1:17.0	My name is Dan Weisman.
1:19.0	I'm a reporter and I like the challenge.
1:21.0	So my job on this show is to take one of the most terrifying and
1:24.4	raging depressing elements of American life and give you something entertaining
1:28.4	and powering and useful. And a Christmas Carol? That is classic entertainment man. I'm Jewish. Whatever, I am a huge sucker for it.
	...

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