By now, you know the story of the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report that came out this week. It was commissioned by the health insurance industry to show how private rates might rise under health reform. It used narrow, worst-case scenario assumptions, and ignored other parts of the reform effort that would lower costs. It was widely condemned by Democrats in Congress and at the White House, and prompted Republican complaints of crippling costs hidden in the current legislation.

In public, it was a typical Washington squabble: Public attack, counter-attack, recrimination, move on. Much less attention has been paid to just how personal the confrontation was for some major health reform players behind the scenes. For this week’s TIME magazine (subscribe here; get link here) Jay Newton-Small and I spoke with a number of people, at the White House, in the Senate and in the insurance lobby, and found a remarkable level of mistrust between people who were meeting regularly as recently as last week. Most alarmingly, they disagree over basic facts.

On Oct. 6, five days before the report came out, a senior Finance Committee aide and Nancy-Ann DeParle, who runs the reform effort at the White House, called Karen Ignagni, the top lobbyist for America’s Health Insurance Plans. They both say that they asked Ignagni the rumors that the industry would release a report slamming the Senate Finance Committee bill were true. “We asked her, ‘Are you about to put out a report?” DeParle remembers. “She said, ‘No, We are miles away from putting out a report.’”

Ignagni says that is simply not true. “I know precisely what I said,” said Ignagni, who runs America’s Health Insurance Plans. “I wanted to make sure that they knew that there were two studies coming out next week.”