PhillyDeals: Same old insurance-industry tricks, a renegade says

Health insurers and their high-priced public-relations people are working behind the scenes to pump up opposition to President Obama's health-care proposals, renegade ex-Cigna Corp. chief spokesman Wendell Potter said yesterday at a Washington news conference hosted by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.).

Potter, of Center City, recounted insurance-company efforts from the 1980s through 2007 to back "duplicitous and well-financed PR campaigns" targeting health-reform advocates from Bill Clinton to filmmaker Michael Moore.

He said the companies used "shills and front groups to spread lies and disinformation" to block reforms that would benefit not just the uninsured, but millions in danger of losing health coverage.

"You can rest assured that the industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR practices it has used for many years, to kill reform this year, or, even better, to shape it so that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street investors far more than average Americans," Potter said.

When protesters at congressional "town hall" meetings shout about the "slippery slope to socialism" or "government takeover of the health-care system," Potter said, "some insurance flack, like I used to be, wrote that" and spread it to protesters through sympathetic political groups and talk-show hosts.

Isn't Obama trying to ration health care?

"We already have Wall Street rationing of health care. We have insidious rationing of health care [by] wealthy investors and hedge-fund managers who care much more about profits than your well-being."

Potter said he had been out of the business for a year and was no longer privy to "secretive" PR campaign details. But he said the results were familiar: "Their playbook is the same."

Citibank has lent a South Korean-owned company $16 million to expand its Fairless Hills factory and hire 20 people.

That's barely a bump in the crash that's ended millions of jobs and cost trillions in financial losses. Yet it's also big enough to subvert the last year's grim headlines:

Globalization isn't dead, even if imports and exports are way down.

U.S. manufacturing isn't dead, despite mass auto-plant closings.

And Citibank's attempt to build the only global bank - while also pushing into crowded domestic markets like Philadelphia - isn't dead, despite top management firings and multibillion-dollar write-offs.

Osstem Implant Co. Ltd. of South Korea sent finance manager Sean Bae and his small team to the Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, N.J., two years ago to scout sites for its new U.S. dental-implant manufacturing and sales subsidiary, Hiossen Inc.

Bae told me his group picked a site in the former U.S. Steel complex (now the state-backed Keystone Industrial Port Complex) in Fairless Hills "because we received so many incentives from the state of Pennsylvania."

Hiossen spent a year and a half renovating and hiring the first 60 of a planned national workforce of 600.

Citi opened its first Philadelphia-area offices around the time Hiossen arrived, stationing lenders in new million-dollar offices at strategic sites like the former Doc's Leisure Time across from the Convention Center.

How'd Citi meet Hiossen? "Our team at Citibank Korea had been courting this company for a long time. They tipped us off there was an opportunity," said Robert Koar, Citi's regional business loan boss. He and Philadelphia-based Citi lender Robert Colton called on Bae.

Working with Citi's Korea team, they pooled information on the Korean parent and the U.S. subsidiary, showing the combination could afford loans too big for Hiossen to justify by itself, too distant for a Korea-based lender to oversee, and too risky for a U.S. lender that didn't know the parent, Koar said.

Bae expects to add about 20 workers in Fairless Hills, and more at other U.S. offices.

"We like it here," he told me. "Fairless Hills is a hub to reach everything from Boston and New York down to D.C."