Anya Radar Wallack’s “What on earth are they doing at UVM Health Network?” left me with two impressions. I doubt Ms. Wallack intended either with her commentary.
The first was that Ms. Wallack’s honesty about a “really messed up American health care system” is itself part of a strategy. Wendell Potter, former corporate communications VP at Cigna and now single-payer activist, calls this “the charm offensive.” The industry seeks to look like it is cooperating, while really just protecting its self-interest against reform.
As Bill Schubart pointed out in his Digger commentary Oct. 3, UVM’s self-interests are “an acquisition strategy that consolidates power, creating an unchecked monopoly with no countervailing regulatory force.”
The second impression is what Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, called “Blah, Blah, Blah” in her speech before the Youth4Climate event in Milan, Italy, in September 2021. Ms. Wallack’s piece has the same “blah, blah, blah” we always get from our business, cultural and political leadership as they sell off our health care to the UVM network. The same network that pays Ms. Wallack $400,000 a year to be a “senior vice president for strategic communications.”
That $400,000 is our money. We struggle every day to pay it, and it does nothing for our health care, though it does produce gigantic CEO salaries, more rationing, and, of course, more of the usual “blah, blah, blah.”
Charlie Murphy
Bennington