Everyone should know who Wendell Potter is by now. Aside from being a bestselling author and a advocate for health insurance reform, he's an outspoken former health insurance industry executive (CIGNA), who saw how the health insurance industry could easily game Obamacare and became an early advocate of Bernie's Medicare-for-All proposal. I want to put one of Potter's Twitter storms into narrative form here. Without mentioning them by name, it's an attack on the treacherous betrayals of working families by conservative Democrats Mayo Pete, Bloomberg and Status Quo Joe.

Lately I’ve noticed some Democratic politicians defending the current healthcare system by saying it preserves "choice" for Americans. As a former health insurance exec who helped draft this talking point, I need to come clean on its back story, and why it's wrong and a trap.





When I worked in the insurance industry, we were instructed to talk about “choice,” based on focus groups and people like Frank Luntz (who wrote the book on how the GOP should communicate with Americans). I used it all the time as an industry flack. But there was a problem.





As a health insurance PR guy, we knew one of the huge *vulnerabilities* of the current system was LACK of choice. In the current system, you can’t pick your own doc, specialist, or hospital without huge “out of network” bills. So we set out to muddy the issue of "choice."





As industry insiders, we also knew most Americans have very little choice of their plan. Your company chooses an insurance provider and you get to pick from a few different plans offered by that one insurer, usually either a high deductible plan or a higher deductible plan.





Another problem insurers like mine had on the “choice” issue: people with employer-based plans have very little choice to keep it. You can lose it if your company changes it, or you change jobs, or turn 26 or many other ways. This is a problem for defenders of the status quo.





Knowing we were losing the "choice" argument, my pals in the insurance industry spent millions on lobbying, ads and spin doctors-- all designed to gaslight Americans into thinking that reforming the status quo would somehow give them "less choice."

This isn't the only time the industry made "choice" a big talking point in its scheme to fight health reform. Soon after Obamacare was passed, it created a front group called the Choice and Competition Coalition, to scare states away from creating exchanges with better plans.





The difference is, this time Democrats are the ones parroting the misleading "choice" talking point. And they're even using it as a weapon against each other. Back in my insurance PR days, this would have stunned me. I bet my old colleagues are thrilled, and celebrating.





The truth, of course, is you have little "choice" in healthcare now. Most can’t keep their plan as long as they want, or visit any doctor or hospital. Some reforms, like Medicare For All, would let you. In other words, Medicare-for-All actually offers more choice than the status quo.





So if a politician tells you they oppose reforming the current healthcare system because they want to preserve "choice," either they don't know what they're talking about-- or they're willfully ignoring the truth. I assure you, the insurance industry is delighted either way.