NOTE: This is the third installment of our series — Meet Your Insurance Company Executive: An Interview with Wendell Potter.

This week, ThinkProgress spoke with Wendell Potter, a former VP of communications at health insurance giant CIGNA, about exactly how insurance companies derail reform and preserve the status quo. Working in public relations for CIGNA, Potter had a direct role in multiple campaigns in the past to minimize public outrage at insurance company abuses, defeat legislation aimed at regulating insurers, and the massive effort to discredit Michael Moore and his movie SiCKO. In addition to enormous amounts of money spent in direct lobbying and campaign contributions, Potter spelled out exactly how insurance companies have prepared to defeat meaningful reform.

Planned well before this year, insurance company CEOs, like Potter’s former boss at CIGNA (H. Edward Hadway), formed a group called the Strategic Communications Committee to develop effective messages and strategy for the industry. Organized through AHIP, the lobbying front for insurance companies, the committee would work with large public relations companies to devise a two-pronged, “duplicitous campaign.” Because insurance companies suffer from low public approval, Potter said, the industry would present itself as “for reform” to the public, yet at the same time label proponents of meaningful reform as “extreme.” The public campaign is for the most part positive, and largely delivered by industry representatives like AHIP chief lobbyist Karen Ignagni. Potter noted:

It’s really a duplicitous PR campaign. They will talk about, in broad terms, how supportive they are of health care reform, but they will be working behind the scenes to kill very, very crucial parts of reform legislation like the public option.

Potter then explained how insurers would use a variety of front groups, set up by PR companies like APCO, to advance a hidden attack campaign. The “dirty” campaign involved feeding talking points to right-wing media, like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. It also includes the creation of front groups to run negative advertisements about reform and mobilize anti-reform “grassroots” groups. Finally, insurers would coordinate with, and sometimes fund, conservative think-tanks to produce academic-appearing reports to advance their cause. Leaked memos from the insurance companies — regarding the campaign against Moore’s SiCKO movie — not only support Potter’s assertions, but specifically describe every step of this process.

Watch Potter explain how insurers control the debate to defeat reform:

To better illustrate the insurers’ two-faced campaign to kill reform, we have produced this chart. Click more to continue continue reading and to view the chart. Read more

Tucked away inside the the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act passed by the House of Representatives is the Green Resources for Energy Efficient Neighborhoods (GREEN) Act, crafted by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO). But given the uncertain timeframe for ACES coming up in the Senate, the GREEN Act will also be moved as a stand-alone bill in both chambers (and currently has 19 co-sponsors in the House).

The idea behind the GREEN Act is incentivizing green construction through a variety of means, including tax credits, lower mortgage rates, and innovative financing techniques. It would also provide for upgrading the energy efficiency of HUD housing and establish grant programs for states and localities to promote their own energy-efficiency programs.

The Wonk Room spoke with Perlmutter today, who explained the economic benefit that he hopes the GREEN Act will have for American households, and particularly those with low- to moderate-incomes:

It helps low- and moderate-incomes. It helps all income levels, because utility costs have been going up for, you know, the last umpteen years. And particularly for low- to moderate-income earners, that’s a big part of their discretionary income, what they have left over at the end of the month, after paycheck and groceries and everything else. So if we can help them control or even shrink utility costs, it’s like a pay raise to those people…We’re hoping to shrink energy costs by 30 percent.

Watch it:

One interesting aspect of the bill is a provision providing for the leasing of renewable energy equipment, such as solar panels or geothermal units, to get around the prohibitive, up-front installation costs that puts this sort of equipment out of the reach of many. In theory, the cost of leasing the equipment would be outweighed by the energy savings:

We have another aspect to the bill which we’ve been working with home-builders on, which is to lease, in effect, your solar or even your geothermal equipment so that people wouldn’t have the big up-front cost to put solar on their roof, but instead they could lease it from the home-builder who’s working with the financial community to put the solar units up on the roof, just like you would lease a satellite dish for your TV.

Watch it:

The GREEN Act is basically a panoply of ways to make greening homes and buildings a bit more affordable and cost-effective, and Perlmutter said that the powerful home-builder’s lobby is as “on-board as you can ever get the home-builders.” The act wouldn’t be a fundamental reorganization of energy policy, but it’s very easy to see how it would do a lot to reduce emissions and energy costs all over the country, when you bundle together the effects of its many parts.