Health and Disability

THIS SUMMER, A NEWS SITE CALLED TARBELL will make its debut and join a growing number of health-journalism startups. Named for the famous early 20th century muckraker Ida Tarbell, whose landmark expose of Standard Oil led to the breakup of the company, Tarbell.org will strive to produce similarly consequential investigative journalism, and pledges to “uncover how lobbyists and special interests affect you.”

Wendell Potter, Tarbell’s founder, oversaw public relations for Humana and served as head of corporate communications for Cigna from 1997 until 2008, when he left after what he called a “crisis of conscience.” Potter said he realized that much of what he had been doing during his insurance career was misleading the public.

The strategy of big insurers, Potter says, was to move everybody into high-deductible plans. “I was expected to promote them, to persuade reporters and the public that they were great for everybody,” he says. “And that was not true.”

After Potter left Cigna, he wrote the book Deadly Spin, in which he detailed deceptive insurance practices and revealed how the industry operated. Potter also wrote a column and provided analysis for the Center for Public Integrity, and examined “the marriage of great wealth and intense political influence” in last year’s Nation on the Take, a book that Nicholas Kristof called “eye-opening.”