Former health care executive Wendell Potter on Tuesday said a new ad campaign is using “fear-mongering” tactics to convince Americans to oppose President Biden’s public health care option proposal.
In an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Potter commented on a new ad being touted by The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future that characterizes a public option as not being in Americans’ best interest, and promotes an alternative “personal option” favorable to private health insurance groups.
Potter, who now serves as president of the Center for Health and Democracy, explained that the messaging in the ad mirrors tactics historically used by private health insurance lobbying groups.
“Those campaigns… are based on what I used to call ‘FUD’ when I was in the insurance business for 20 years,” Potter said. “We used to create ads like that that are intended to instill fear in people, to make them feel uncertain about what’s being proposed and to doubt that what’s being proposed is in their best interest.”
“These are fear-mongering campaigns and they often are very effective,” he added.
Potter said that while the ads can be impactful, he does not believe the personal option proposal will “resonate very much.”
“It’s what some years ago folks were referring to as a ‘personal responsibility brigade,’ and that is it’s your responsibility to find private health insurance,” he said. “It does not work that way in health insurance and we need to have some government involvement in our health care system, or the insurance industry will revert to its old ways of deciding who they want to insure and blackballing those they don’t want to insure.”
Watch part of Potter’s interview above.
This post was updated and corrected on March 23 at 3:13 p.m.
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