Hey there, I've got kind of a holiday story for you. I thought we'd sneak it in before the year ended.

You may have seen an essay or two floating around the internet this year along the lines of,

if you think health care in Canada is worse than in the US. Uh, I'm really sorry.

I'm the guy who sold you that big fat lie.

The author is Wendell Potter, and he was in charge of communications

for Cigna for a long time,

for most of the 90s and aughties and then about a dozen years ago he went rogue

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.

Both of them are part of my work to make amends for what I used to do for a living,

which was in many cases to mislead people into thinking that we have the best health care

system in the world. You may have an opinion about the Canadian health care

system and you think that way because of the work that I used to do. I talked with them

last summer and it was a super interesting

conversation but I wasn't exactly sure what to do with it or when like what was the

occasion what was the lesson for right now and then a few weeks ago I thought, oh, Wendell Potter's story is a

version of a Christmas Carol. Only when you dig in it is messier and way more interesting.

This is an arm and a leg, show about the cost of health care.

My name is Dan Weisman.

I'm a reporter and I like the challenge.

So my job on this show is to take one of the most terrifying and

raging depressing elements of American life and give you something entertaining

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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