Ida Tarbell is about to experience something of a renaissance.

Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and was best known for her reporting in the early 1900s on John D. Rockefeller for McClure’s Magazine — articles that were pulled together into her classic book — The History of Standard Oil Company.

Amazon Studios has just announced that it will produce the first feature length movie about the great muckraker.

And former insurance industry public relations executive Wendell Potter is starting a new journalism venture titled simply — Tarbell.

Potter famously left his job as public relations executive at Cigna in 2008 in a self proclaimed “crisis of conscience.”

He has since written three books – Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans,  Obamacare: What’s In It for Me/What Everyone Needs to Know about the Affordable Care Act, and most recently Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It.

But people in the single payer community have their doubts about Potter.

John Stauber founded the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) in Madison, Wisconsin in 1993, retiring in the summer of 2009.

Before leaving, Stauber’s last hire was Wendell Potter, introduced to him by Avram Goldstein in a phone call in May, 2009.

Goldstein was a health care reporter who went on to work for Health Care for America Now (HCAN) — the huge union funded, MoveOn-backed coalition advocating for passage of Obamacare.

“I was surprised when HCAN called me because I was a harsh critic of their marginalization of single payer in the United States,” Stauber related in 2012. “Av was unaware of that. He told me that he had an insurance industry whistleblower who wanted to work with CMD, and would I speak with him. I said I’d be happy to speak and shortly received a call from Wendell. I immediately told Wendell that HCAN was wrong in its approach, that only a single payer system could actually meet people’s needs. He said he agreed. I also told him I would need to do a complete background check before I could consider hiring him, and he consented. The search was clean, Wendell appeared the real deal, and soon I introduced him to Bill Moyers who featured a hard hitting interview with him that aired in the summer of 2009. Wendell had been making a good six figure salary with the insurance industry, and HCAN arranged with the TIDES Foundation for Wendell’s salary while he was with CMD in 2009. HCAN was awash in funds from unions and foundations, much of it delivered via the TIDES Foundation.”

“I formally stepped down at CMD in July 2009 but stayed in close contact with Wendell. I predicted to him that Obamacare would be a political disaster for real reform, and tried to persuade him to abandon it since it undermined many minimum reforms that he himself had advocated such as the long-gone ‘public option.’ Unfortunately he stuck with the President and HCAN, and was rewarded with a mention from Obama during a speech to Congress. He became a liberal celebrity, and got himself a book deal.”

Another critic is Oliver Hall, a public interest lawyer representing activists who filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of Single Payer Action, It’s Our Economy and 50 medical doctors arguing that there only one constitutional way to cover everyone, control costs, and prevent 120 deaths a day from lack of health insurance — single payer.

In an article in the Nation in 2012, Potter wrote that those single payer supporters who challenged Obama’s law were playing into the hands of the insurance industry and they must “bury the hatchet” and come together.

“Single payer is basically incompatible with the ACA, yet Potter says we should bury the hatchet and support the ACA,” Hall said in 2012. “Meaning — give up on single payer. Notice he does not say, as part of his great strategy moving forward, that there is any way the ACA will ever lead to single payer. This is the same thing Democrats always tell the left: support us, even though we oppose your position, because the Republicans are worse.”

“Potter’s main point is to suppress discussion of the only evidence-based solution, as the Democrats always have. No single payer advocate I know opposed the entire ACA – just the mandate. Why wouldn’t we continue to do so?”

In 2012, Stauber said that Potter’s attack on single payer activists in the Nation “reads like a ‘hire me’ ad for someone regretting the loss of his big corporate salary.”

Potter has now pulled together an esteemed group of supporters for his Tarbell project — including David Boardman, dean of the School of Media and Mass Communication at Temple University, Bill Buzenberg, former executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, Sebastian Esser, editor of Krautreporter in Germany, , Mark Glaser, founder, publisher and executive editor of MediaShift, Tim Griggs, Innovator in Residence at Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, Keith Hammonds, president of Solutions Journalism Network, Maria Vizcarrondo, Executive Director of Nerney Leadership Institute and Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.

What made Potter think that given his track record as a former insurance industry public relations executive and frontman for Obama and the Democrats, he could appropriate the name, picture and legacy of Ida Tarbell — one of the nation’s great investigative reporters?

“I want you to know that I have been working with legal counsel every step of the way and will continue to do so,” Potter wrote back. “And, of course, the intent is to honor the incredibly important journalism that Ida Tarbell produced during the Gilded Age, which she played a significant role in bringing to an end. We live in an age that bears a lot of similarity to the Gilded Age. Moneyed interests have once again gained an unfair advantage in our political process. Our goal will be to report on who is writing the checks to finance corruption of government at all levels and to connect the dots for readers — to help people understand how their lives are affected, so often adversely, by the increasing ability of corporate and other special interests to call the shots. Ida’s work will inspire the work that we do.”

Stauber isn’t buying it.

Last year, Stauber wrote that “the investigative story I want to see from Wendell is one I am sure he will never tell — an insider exposé of the ugly rise and fall of Obamacare.”

“This is a story Wendell knows inside and out, but I doubt he will ever really come to grips with its truth,” Stauber wrote. “Obamacare was a pro-industry Democrat scam that destroyed an opportunity for single payer education and reform and ultimately brought devastating political ruin to the Democrats themselves.”

Potter says he still thinks single payer is the best solution, but couldn’t forgo the chance to help people in need.

“I have talked and written a lot about how the insurance industry and other special interests wrote much of the ACA,” Potter said. “I wrote about it in Deadly Spin, which came out in 2010. I have talked about it in speeches and in commentaries I’ve written. In my new book, Nation on the Take, I explained the role the pharmaceutical industry played in influencing the reform debate, how it blackmailed Obama and Congressional Democrats to make sure pharma companies would not be adversely affected. So what I have done from the very beginning and continue to do is expose how moneyed interests that call the shots in Washington and state capitals. And that is what I plan to continue doing with Tarbell.”

“John clearly was disappointed that I didn’t denounce the ACA as Congress was about to pass it and that I didn’t join him and others in saying that the bill should be killed. The reason I didn’t was that I had traveled the country over the previous months giving talks and interviews. I met so many desperate people who could not get the care they needed because of the horribly dysfunctional system controlled by insurance companies. Yes, enacting single payer would have been far better, and I have been very critical of Obama and Democrats for not starting with single payer, but because of the power of the special interests, which I knew all too well from my two decades in the industry, I knew the ACA was as good as it was going to get in 2010. If it failed, I believed that it would be a long time before Democrats would try again. Maybe I was wrong. I don’t know. But what I do know is that many of those people I met across the country got some help after the law was passed. The ACA was not good legislation. I have said many times that it was the end of the beginning of reform. But I’m confident that there are people who are alive today because of that flawed law.”

“One of the things we will do at Tarbell is explain to people how single payer health care systems work and how other systems work,” Potter said. “We will not advocate for a particular solution but we will strive to make people aware of various potential solutions — and who is opposed to them — and to encourage people to become more engaged in efforts to make a positive difference. It will be a blend of investigative/accountability journalism and solutions journalism.”