Last Thursday, the President told a pretty strange and macabre story in a speech at a DNC fundraiser.
I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.
I discussed this story with Andrew Lawton and Ari Fine on the latest edition of Right this Way Friday night. What really bugged me then, and bugs me more the more I think about it, is that the woman, whose name the President never did mention, couldn’t pay a $5,000 deductible before her insurance coverage kicked in. Her name, by the way, was Melanie Shouse and she was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer years after noticing a lump in her breast and letting it slide because she and her husband had poured their life savings into a new business. Life is full of choices and she made the wrong one. That happens and while I feel bad for her and her family, I’m glad she had the freedom to choose her course in life.
It doesn’t bother me so much that the President got the story wrong when he said she didn’t have insurance. She did, though the policy she had required a deductible larger than she could pay and we know from the health care debate, it’s not important if you actually get treated for your illnesses so long as you have coverage. Further, she was on a government-run health insurance plan through most of her illness, to no avail. But I’ll let him slide on that (though Tom Maguire won’t). He doesn’t have a great rack record for accuracy in his speeches, especially when telling a sad story to gin up support for one of his grand schemes.
It does bother me quite a lot that Shouse’s illness had gained not only his attention but also the attention of Representative Rosa DeLauro who did exactly nothingsubstantial to help her themselves while she was alive. She had become a pretty public activist for government-run health care, so it’s not like folks like Obama and DeLauro, who are both well-off, didn’t know she needed a bit of help. I don’t think it would have put much of a dent in their bank accounts had they written Shouse a $5000 check to cover her deductible or to offset some of the cost of her cancer treatments that weren’t being covered by Medicare and Medicaid. It would have taken little effort for either of them to mount a nationwide fundraising campaign to get all her treatments covered, including the very expensive ones that her government-run health care plan wouldn’t pay for. They didn’t do either of those. Instead, the President used her corpse as a campaign prop to make him look completely awesome and to try to shove a truly monstrous health care scheme down our throats.
That makes me just a little bit sick.
Tags: National Health Care
She wouldn’t have had to pay $5000 just to get diagnosed. Even for the uninsured, a typical mammogram only costs $100-200…maybe $250. Now let’s just assume that because there already was a suspicious mass that she was aware of, perhaps they would have had to take more thorough x-rays or something. So what are we up to, $400? $500? Are we to believe that if she would have gotten diagnosed, that she and her family would not have been able to come up the additional money to meet the deductible? No way no how?
You are correct in pointing out that this was a choice. She took a risk cleaning out her life savings to start a business. Businesses themselves are very risky. I’ll be the last person to tell someone else how to spend their money, but dang it, if you are about to spend your last dime on a luxury without considering future necessities, don’t expect me to pay for those necessities when they come up.
[...] of all those czars Obama has appointed, isn’t there one for Fact-Checking The Speeches? Read this and be shocked, just shocked, that Obama had his facts wrong [...]