Something still haunts Ed Weisbart, MD, from his days in the health insurance business.

It was 1999, and Weisbart was the medical director of a Chicago medical group that managed care for more than 140,000 people. The enterprise was running like a well-oiled machine — until one day, a man presented with a rare blood clotting disorder that would cost the company $1 million a year to treat. At that sum, one of its regional offices would likely go out of business.

Weisbart caught himself entertaining dark thoughts. What if the company just gave this guy the cold shoulder? Could they simply not answer his calls? These were "paper records days," he said — in theory, the company could lose his medical records. If he showed up at the office to meet with anybody, maybe they could make him wait an hour or two.

"And then, what? He would complain to us, and say this used to be a good office, and it's not anymore – I'm going to go somewhere else," Weisbart said. "And I would be thinking, I won."

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Weisbart never acted on any of these impulses, he said, nor did he tell anybody about those thoughts until years later. The office didn't go out of business, either, and the man received his treatments. But the temptation toward corruption left a deep impact.

"It's haunted me ever since," Weisbart said. "I consider myself a generally ethical patient advocate, and yet, I was so corrupted by the finances of the system that I was actually developing schemes to make a very sick person not want to get health care with us. And isn't the point of a health care system that you should want to get health care?"

Today, Weisbart is the national secretary for Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), an advocacy group representing more than 25,000 physicians who support a national health insurance plan and oppose a profit-driven health insurance system in which companies can choose profits over patients. That system's interests are at the heart of a stunning Medicare proposal in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page right-wing agenda for a second Trump administration that experts say would harm patients while enabling insurance companies to funnel billions of dollars in desperately needed funds from the Medicare........

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