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- Apr 4, 2009
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Wendell Potter has been awarded the 2011 Ridenhour Book Prize for his work, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR is Killing Healthcare and Deceiving Americans.
In 2007, Wendell was the head of Public Relations and Corporate Communications for CIGNA when the insurer denied a life-saving liver transplant to Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17 year old California girl who suffered from leukemia. Desperate to save their daughter's life, Nataline's parents organized protests and demonstrations against CIGNA. The company eventually yielded to public pressure and reversed its decision -- but too late. Nataline died just two hours after CIGNA approved the operation.
Nataline's case profoundly effected Wendell. He gradually felt that he had "sold his soul" by being "part of a industry that would do whatever it took to perpetuate its extraordinarily profitable existence." Wendell quit the insurance industry and started working tirelessly to make the public aware of the industry's widepsread unethical practices and PR techniques, and the harm these practices cause Americans.
Each year, the Ridenhour Prize honors an outstanding work of social significance from the previous publishing year. The Prize honors Wendell for having the courage to walk away from a lucrative, longstanding corporate career to speak out against the industry he worked in, and write an important expose' about an industry that values profits over human lives.
Wendell Potter on his decision to speak out:
One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage." And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's favorite quotes was a Dante quote, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."
If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
Edmund Burke