Excerpt:
When Wendell Potter first saw them, he froze. “It felt like touching an electrical fence,” he says. “I remember tearing up and thinking, how could this be real.” Thousands of them had lined up under a cloudy sky in an open field.
Many had camped out the night before. When their turns came, doctors
treated them in animal stalls and on gurneys placed on rain-soaked
sidewalks. They were Americans who needed basic medical care. Potter had driven
to the Wise County Fairgrounds in Virginia in July 2007 after reading
that a group called Remote Area Medical, which flew American doctors to
remote Third World villages, was hosting a free outdoor clinic.
Potter, a Cigna health care executive who ate from gold-rimmed
silverware in corporate jets, says that morning was his “Road to
Damascus” experience. “It looked like a refugee camp,” Potter says. “It just hit me like a
bolt of lightning. What I was doing for a living was making it necessary
for people to resort to getting care in animal stalls.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday on the constitutionality
of the Affordable Care Act is a colossal legal and political issue. For
Potter, though, the issue became a crisis of faith.
