Deadly Spin

Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans is a work of political nonfiction by Wendell Potter. First published in 2010 by Bloomsbury, the book explains how health care insurers thrive on false promises and how their profit-chasing costs lives. The book won the 2011 Ridenhour Book Prize, and it sparked a public outcry for change. Potter worked in healthcare for over two decades and served as the senior VP of CIGNA. He left the insurance industry because of its malpractice and illusion-making. Deadly Spin is his first book.

In the book, Potter acknowledges that he once fuelled the healthcare insurance lies. As a corporate communications VP at CIGNA, he was directly responsible for CIGNA’s public image. He explains that over 45,000 Americans die each year because they don’t have health insurance, and he’s partly responsible for this tragedy. However, he couldn’t continue watching the industry take advantage of America’s most vulnerable citizens, and he decided to expose the truth about the health insurance industry.

Potter explains that large-scale corporations are part of the health insurance industry’s problems. Company officers focus on driving profits to increase share values rather than meeting healthcare needs. The expectations of Wall Street, Potter warns, are largely responsible for propagating this unfair system, and these expectations explain why non-profit insurers struggle to survive.



The American health insurance business thrives on using public relations, or PR, to its advantage. Potter explains that he, and others like him, actively campaigned against healthcare reforms that threatened profit margins. The public, however, never see this influence. Successful PR campaigns mean the public only see what they are told to see. Although this PR manipulation is prevalent across all industries in modern America, Potter warns that it’s particularly worrying in an industry such as healthcare.

Although Deadly Spin exposes the truth behind PR and its influence on health insurance, Potter isn’t suggesting that all PR professionals are acting wrongly. Instead, he’s exposing the influential minority with an agenda that undermines the entire healthcare system in America. Similarly, Potter notes that most health insurance executives believe in their job and believe that they help Americans access proper medical treatment. PR is so successful that even industry insiders don’t understand the problems.

Deadly Spin examines the specific PR strategies active in the health insurance industry right now. Most importantly, the health insurance industry makes itself visible, and aligns itself with reform and fairness for all Americans. This “charm offensive,” as Potter describes it, distracts people from asking too many questions about how, exactly, the health insurance industry is achieving these supposed goals.



Potter urges us to recognize the tricks that unscrupulous PR experts and propagandists use to secure their agendas. In Deadly Spin, Potter discusses eight techniques that these influencers use to trick people into thinking a certain way. For example, propagandists use fear to drive change. They vilify an individual, a cause, or an idea to make it seem harmful.

Propagandists use threats that frighten people—job losses, poverty, loss of living standards or civil liberties—to influence how people think. This is a very dangerous tactic, as explained by Potter, because it makes people act against their own best interests. Other techniques include using strong, emotive language, euphemisms, insults, celebrity endorsements, peer pressure, and being relatable.

Deadly Spin highlights that these PR techniques are operating across America’s health insurance industry right now. The industry feeds on selective studies and reports, careful ad placement, selective news coverage, scare-mongering, policy attacks, and general bad faith. Potter blames the US government for giving private, profit-driven organizations so much power over American health and wellness.



Effective PR distracts people from the real problems, Potter argues. For example, companies like CIGNA are known to cancel insurance policies for seriously ill patients who fail to disclose minor medical ailments such as heartburn, but the public rarely hears these stories. If bad PR does break out, it’s easy to convince a sympathetic news reporter and an expert with debatable qualifications to spin a different story. Too often, Potter explains, Americans are caught in webs of deceit, even when their lives are on the line.

Deadly Spin exposes a lesser-known weapon of effective PR campaigns—the third-party technique. Bringing in third parties means using allegedly neutral groups and individuals to support a cause. The public believes that, since the group or person has no political or financial interest in the cause, but that they believe in it, then it must be a good cause. The third-party technique is one of the most manipulative PR techniques of all, and it’s particularly prevalent in the health insurance industry.

Most importantly, Deadly Spin encourages readers to question what they watch, hear, and read about across news and media outlets. There are agendas behind everything, and the health insurance industry is no exception. Potter believes that the government must act to control the power a profit-driven network has over the lives and deaths of American citizens.