Ex-Director of PR of Cigna testified to the Senate about the dirty deeds inside insurances companies and why we *need* a public option.

Wendell Potter, an ex-director of PR of Cigna, has been coming forward to expose the dirty practices used by insurance companies to please Wall Street investors. In this testimony to the Senate, Potter explained how insurance companies think and how that thought process ends up in creating angry, misled Americans now yelling at town hall meetings, not to mention the utterly inadequate health care system that we have now.

At the end of his testimony, Potter delineates why the public option is a must:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for beginning this conversation on transparency and for making this such a priority. S. 1050, your legislation to require insurance companies to be more honest and transparent in how they communicate with consumers, is essential. So, too, is S.91278, the Consumers Choice Health Plan, which would create a strong public health insurance option as a benchmark in transparency and quality. Americans need and overwhelmingly support the option of obtaining coverage from a public plan. The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent, publicly-accountable health care option as a ―government-run system.‖ But what we have today, Mr. Chairman, is a Wall Street-run system that has proven itself an untrustworthy partner to its customers, to the doctors and hospitals who deliver care, and to the state and federal governments that attempt to regulate it.

Our choices at this crossroad in the reform are not between the government and freedom in the free market - it is between the government and Wall Street/for-profit insurance companies. Doing nothing leaves us in the hands of hungry Wall Street wolves looking to profit from our sufferings.

It is not an option.