were many times when I had to fight to hold back tears. Moore had gotten it right. If I hadn’t been with a colleague, I probably would have joined all the others in the audience in giving the movie a standing ovation, just as the people at Cannes did when it was first screened.
The next day, the front group that APCO had set up to discredit Sicko issued a statement warning against “a government takeover” of health care:
“Health Care America, a non-partisan, non-profit health care advocacy organization, released the following statement in response to a California rally held by Michael Moore and a variety of advocates in support of a government takeover of our health care system.
“The reality is that government-run health systems around the world are failing patients—forcing them to forgo treatments or seek out-of-pocket care in other countries.”
Bill Pierce was listed as the contact person for Health Care America, but if you had dialed the phone number listed for him at the organization, you would have reached him at his desk at APCO in Washington.
A week later, Moore held another screening, this one in Washington. He invited members of Congress, but few showed up. He also invited the heads of the big health care trade associations. None of them attended.
The industry, however, was prepared for the event. An ad targeting the movie appeared in Washington’s newspapers. The message: “In America, you wait in line to see a movie. In government-run health care systems, you wait to see a doctor.” The sponsor: Health Care America.
For several weeks after that screening, APCO sent me and other PR chiefs daily reports of the stories it had placed in the media via Health Care America as well as the commentaries and op-eds APCO’s recruits had had published in newspapers and other media outlets from coast to coast.
The campaign cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, all of which came from premiums paid by health-plan members, but industry executives felt this was a good and appropriate use of those premium dollars. Though Sicko grossed nearly $25 million at the box office in the United States, that figure wasn’t even in the same ballpark as the $120 million that Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 had made on U.S. screens just three years earlier. We believed the industry’s behind-the-scenes campaign against the movie might have had something to do with the comparatively small box office numbers. We were pleased that AHIP and APCO had succeeded in getting their talking points into most of the stories that appeared about the movie, and that not a single reporter had done enough investigative work to find out that insurers had provided the lion’s share of funding to set up Health Care America.
We were also relieved that centrist Democrats had not embraced Sicko . All in all, the movie, in our view, had not succeeded in altering the “collective opinion.” Spending the extra money to push Moore off the cliff had not been necessary.
More important, we considered the campaign against Sicko to be a warm-up act to the health care reform debate that all of us knew would begin in Congress soon after the next president took office. And most of us still believed that person would be the industry’s former nemesis, Hillary Clinton.
C H A P T E R I I I
Perception Is Reality
B EFORE I take you with me on my unexpectedly life-changing trip to Tennessee and describe the last horror story I ever worked on for CIGNA, I should explain how public relations evolved into such a powerful yet largely invisible force in our society. I also want to give you an idea of what I actually did on a day-to-day basis as head of PR at one of the country’s biggest insurers.
To understand why you believe some of the things you believe and do some of the things you do, it’s important for you to understand what PR people do and how they do it.
It’s actually nothing new. Human beings have distorted information for as long as
The next day, the front group that APCO had set up to discredit Sicko issued a statement warning against “a government takeover” of health care:
“Health Care America, a non-partisan, non-profit health care advocacy organization, released the following statement in response to a California rally held by Michael Moore and a variety of advocates in support of a government takeover of our health care system.
“The reality is that government-run health systems around the world are failing patients—forcing them to forgo treatments or seek out-of-pocket care in other countries.”
Bill Pierce was listed as the contact person for Health Care America, but if you had dialed the phone number listed for him at the organization, you would have reached him at his desk at APCO in Washington.
A week later, Moore held another screening, this one in Washington. He invited members of Congress, but few showed up. He also invited the heads of the big health care trade associations. None of them attended.
The industry, however, was prepared for the event. An ad targeting the movie appeared in Washington’s newspapers. The message: “In America, you wait in line to see a movie. In government-run health care systems, you wait to see a doctor.” The sponsor: Health Care America.
For several weeks after that screening, APCO sent me and other PR chiefs daily reports of the stories it had placed in the media via Health Care America as well as the commentaries and op-eds APCO’s recruits had had published in newspapers and other media outlets from coast to coast.
The campaign cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, all of which came from premiums paid by health-plan members, but industry executives felt this was a good and appropriate use of those premium dollars. Though Sicko grossed nearly $25 million at the box office in the United States, that figure wasn’t even in the same ballpark as the $120 million that Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 had made on U.S. screens just three years earlier. We believed the industry’s behind-the-scenes campaign against the movie might have had something to do with the comparatively small box office numbers. We were pleased that AHIP and APCO had succeeded in getting their talking points into most of the stories that appeared about the movie, and that not a single reporter had done enough investigative work to find out that insurers had provided the lion’s share of funding to set up Health Care America.
We were also relieved that centrist Democrats had not embraced Sicko . All in all, the movie, in our view, had not succeeded in altering the “collective opinion.” Spending the extra money to push Moore off the cliff had not been necessary.
More important, we considered the campaign against Sicko to be a warm-up act to the health care reform debate that all of us knew would begin in Congress soon after the next president took office. And most of us still believed that person would be the industry’s former nemesis, Hillary Clinton.
C H A P T E R I I I
Perception Is Reality
B EFORE I take you with me on my unexpectedly life-changing trip to Tennessee and describe the last horror story I ever worked on for CIGNA, I should explain how public relations evolved into such a powerful yet largely invisible force in our society. I also want to give you an idea of what I actually did on a day-to-day basis as head of PR at one of the country’s biggest insurers.
To understand why you believe some of the things you believe and do some of the things you do, it’s important for you to understand what PR people do and how they do it.
It’s actually nothing new. Human beings have distorted information for as long as
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