I was about to write up a long diary on Bill Moyers’ interview last night of former Head of Corporate Communications at CIGNA, Wendell Potter, citisven ad Dkos has already done a superior job of that. And Here are the video and transcript.

The bottom line is that it’s all about the bottom line:

If one company’s medical loss ratio was 77.9 percent, for example, in one quarter, and the next quarter, it was 78.2 percent. It seems like a small movement. But investors will think that’s ridiculous. And it’s horrible.

In other words, the insurance industry refers to money actually spent on our healthcare as "medical loss." Wall Street judges insurance companies and their CEO by how much "loss" they incur.

To minimize "loss," insurance companies set up "rescision departments." When someone gets expensively ill, their case is turned over to those rescionists to see if they can find any technicality by which to avoid "incurring that loss," i.e., paying that person’s medical bills, by retractively cancelling their insurance. Per the LA Times:

Executives of three of the nation’s largest health insurers told federal lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday that they would continue canceling medical coverage for some sick policyholders, despite withering criticism from Republican and Democratic members of Congress who decried the practice as unfair and abusive.

The hearing on the controversial action known as rescission, which has left thousands of Americans burdened with costly medical bills despite paying insurance premiums, began a day after President Obama outlined his proposals for revamping the nation’s healthcare system.

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

[...]

The executives — Richard A. Collins, chief executive of UnitedHealth’s Golden Rule Insurance Co.; Don Hamm, chief executive of Assurant Health and Brian Sassi, president of consumer business for WellPoint Inc., parent of Blue Cross of California — were courteous and matter-of-fact in their testimony.

But they would not commit to limiting rescissions to only policyholders who intentionally lie or commit fraud to obtain coverage, a refusal that met with dismay from legislators on both sides of the political aisle.

[...]

So, how are any of us to know whether we actually have insurance or not? Making payments each month is certainly no guarantee.

The bottom line from that Wendell Potter interview and the congessional testimony of the health-insurance CEOs is that there is no way in hell that a free market inhabited by for-profit insurers can provide for the healthcare needs of this nation.