Wendell Potter says he earned a handsome salary for misleading the public.

For two decades he was the senior public relations executive for Humana and then CIGNA, two of the country's largest for-profit health insurers. He went to the office every day to help his company increase the bottom line, impress Wall Street and reward top managers with astronomical paydays.

Potter's duties included deflecting blame and pushing back with half truths anytime insurers were accused of denying care to the sick, driving up the price of insurance and swelling the ranks of the uninsured.

Potter also collaborated with other industry spokesmen to set up front groups and launch fear campaigns to turn the public against change and derail reform legislation.

Change of course

By July 2007, however, Potter began to question what he was doing. While visiting his parents in eastern Tennessee, Potter read of a health fair for the uninsured in nearby Virginia. He went, and the experience opened his eyes.

He saw people — some of whom had driven hundreds of miles — lined up before dawn for extractions, mammograms, sigmoidoscopies and other free care in cinder block buildings and animal stalls. The throng was so big that many were turned away.

"I was seeing something that I guess I was supposed to see," Potter told a class last week at Franklin & Marshall College. "It made me realize that what I was doing for a living was making it necessary for those folks to have to stand in line to get care in barns."

Years earlier, Potter had been a newspaper reporter. His entry into corporate public relations was an unplanned detour. But the larger salary, perks and ego-gratifying lifestyle seduced him to stay until he woke up one day with pangs of conscience.

"I remember looking in a mirror and saying, 'Who are you? How did this happen to you?' "

After a grueling assignment defending the company's role in the death of a 17-year-old girl waiting for a liver transplant, Potter had had enough. He quit his job in May 2008, and after several months of soul searching he started speaking out against insurance practices he had long been paid to defend.

Potter testified before Congress, appeared on news programs and wrote "Deadly Spin," a newly published book offering an insider's perspective on the health insurance industry's avarice and anti-consumer practices.

"I'm trying to make amends," Potter, a mild-mannered 59-year-old in a gray suit, told me during his visit to F&M. "I'm really excited about being a journalist again. I'm trying to pull the curtain back so that people see how these companies operate."

New riches

Why does one executive become a corporate whistle-blower while others remain mum? Fear of ostracism and the loss of an enviable lifestyle buys silence, of course. And economic segregation also insulates bigwigs from the people their companies hurt.

Potter went out of his way to see the health fair that prodded his conscience. How many executives would do that?

Potter emphasized to students that making the break was not easy, but "it gets to the point," he said, "that you can't not do it."

Now he's full of plans: regular columns on Huffington Post; another book, perhaps. And he has a new mission: to promote social responsibility in business.

He said he feels richer in every way thinkable.

jhawkes@lnpnews.com