A moment in my career when I had to make a decision that challenged my morals and ethics was —— Oof. I’m going to let you have that one first. Oh, heavens. Well, I had one this year, I guess, the one that sticks out in my mind quite a lot. I was called while I was in the operating room, performing breast reconstruction, by an insurance company. They didn’t know the patient’s diagnosis. They didn’t know she had breast cancer. They wanted me to justify her overnight stay. This has become absurd. I chose to speak out. I posted a video that I didn’t think would be widely viewed. It was. I got a phone call into the operating room saying that UnitedHealthcare wanted me to call them about one of the patients who was having surgery today, who was actually asleep, having surgery. It’s 2025, and insurance just keeps getting worse. “Dr. Elisabeth Potter made national news for publicly calling out health insurance companies.” “Video has now been viewed over 13 million times.” “Millions of people got a front-row seat to the bureaucratic madness doctors wrestle with every day.” “This is exactly what is wrong with insurance companies.” And the insurance company kind of came after me for that. “United sought to discredit her and is denying coverage for her surgery center.” “UnitedHealthcare demanded she remove the video from her social media channels, accusing her of making false claims.” “And that it informed Dr. Potter that it wasn’t accepting new surgery centers well before she posted any videos.” That was one of those moments in my career as a physician when I thought, to take care of these women, I can’t just be silent. And it almost cost me my business. Being honest about the problems that I see for my patients and being outspoken about that, that was a difficult decision this year, but also a rewarding one, like the hard things usually are. I would say that in the area of the insurance company stepping in to stop care, the really hard cases over the years, I worked at CVS Health, I would see those. But in most of the circumstances, the really hard cases, we end up erring on the side of the patient and the doctor and going forward with them. I would say that from a moral point of view, the biggest issue for me over the years was when I went to work for CVS, we had a big retail pharmacy. And it was all supposed to be part of health care, but we sold a lot of cigarettes. And how can you continue to sell cigarettes and consider yourself a health care company? And I thought I’d be able to insist that we get rid of cigarettes when I first joined the company. And of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case. So my dilemma over the years was, am I really going to eventually accomplish anything here? And how much longer do I struggle with it? So over the years, you continue to build the case for getting rid of cigarettes. And eventually, we were able to remove them. “CVS will stop selling all tobacco products.” “It will lose about $2 billion annually.” “But in making the decision, the company said, ‘We’ve come to the conclusion that cigarettes have no place in a setting where health care is being delivered.’” It does give, I think, a nice contrast to the perspectives that we have. When I’m working in an insurance company, I’m thinking of a big group of people. When you’re taking care of patients, you’re thinking about that patient right in front of you. When I’m taking care of the patient in front of me, I’m thinking about all of the patients who are in that same situation. And I’m speaking here for all of the doctors who’ve reached out and who want to be heard.
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