Post by philunderwood on Jul 13, 2011 7:36:26 GMT -5
neoneocon.com/2011/07/12/you-know-that-story-about-obamas-mothers-health-insurance-well/
You know that story about Obama’s mother’s health insurance? Well…
…it turns out that Obama’s story of his mother’s health insurance woes was misleading—to put the nicest spin on it. The facts have come out in a new biography of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the relatively young age of 52.
I have no doubt that it was a sad and horrific experience for both Dunham and her entire family. But Obama’s narrative about it—which he’s offered in many addresses about the perils of health care insurance in this country—is that, in addition to struggling with the illness itself, his mother had to wrestle with insurance companies determined to deny her health coverage due to their assertion of a pre-existing condition:
“I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” Obama said in September 2007.
“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” Obama added in January 2008.
Dunham’s biographer Janny Scott was not writing a hit job on Obama or his mother. The book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, is basically admiring. But Ms. Scott’s research inadvertently revealed facts about Dunham’s final illness that elucidate her son’s story:
Ann’s compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment,” Scott writes. “Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”
Scott writes that Dunham, who wanted to be compensated for those costs as well as for her living expenses, “filed a separate claim under her employer’s disability insurance policy.” It was that claim, with the insurance company CIGNA, that was denied in August 1995 because, CIGNA investigators said, Dunham’s condition was known before she was covered by the policy.
What’s the difference? Well, if Obama is using the story to illustrate the problems with health insurance coverage and it actually involves a job-related disability insurance policy, that’s a very different animal. What’s more, if a person is refused coverage for cancer treatment as a whole, this involves a huge amount of money and yes, it could easily bankrupt even a working person. But being refused coverage for the deductible and uncovered expenses, which apparently came to a couple of thousand dollars a year, is hardly the sort of story that’s required if the goal is to alarm people. So, best to imply that things were even worse.
If you go back and look at the Obama quotes above, you’ll note an interesting phenomenon: he never actually says that it was his mother’s health insurance company that denied coverage—although he’s using the argument in the health care coverage debate, and he has to know that almost every listener will assume that’s what he meant. Instead, he carefully uses the words “insurance” and the word “medical bills.”
Technically, it was insurance that was involved—but it was disability insurance. And technically, there were indeed uncovered medical bills—but they only involved a deductible and incidental and relatively minor payments. The bulk of the bills were paid, and by Dunham’s health insurance.
Ah, but maybe Obama just didn’t know the details. That might be true, except for one little thing—Scott reports that, after the disability payments were denied, Ann Dunham wrote the company (CIGNA) a letter saying that “she was turning over the case to ‘my son and attorney, Barack Obama.’” So we can assume that Obama was well aware of the facts. And technically, he’s not actually lying when he says she was trying to get money from insurance to pay for medical expenses. But to use the story to imply that she was denied health insurance coverage is purposely misleading—but being misleading is Obama’s specialty.
[NOTE: As far as bankrupting the family goes---in the 90s Obama was a professor at the University of Chicago, as well as an attorney at the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He was already married but he and Michelle had no children, and she was gainfully employed as well. Of course, it's not required that Obama pay his mother's health care cost overrun, but to claim that health care expenses of a few hundred dollars a month threatened to bankrupt "our family," as Obama stated, seems ludicrous.]
Posted by neo-neocon
You know that story about Obama’s mother’s health insurance? Well…
…it turns out that Obama’s story of his mother’s health insurance woes was misleading—to put the nicest spin on it. The facts have come out in a new biography of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the relatively young age of 52.
I have no doubt that it was a sad and horrific experience for both Dunham and her entire family. But Obama’s narrative about it—which he’s offered in many addresses about the perils of health care insurance in this country—is that, in addition to struggling with the illness itself, his mother had to wrestle with insurance companies determined to deny her health coverage due to their assertion of a pre-existing condition:
“I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” Obama said in September 2007.
“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” Obama added in January 2008.
Dunham’s biographer Janny Scott was not writing a hit job on Obama or his mother. The book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, is basically admiring. But Ms. Scott’s research inadvertently revealed facts about Dunham’s final illness that elucidate her son’s story:
Ann’s compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment,” Scott writes. “Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”
Scott writes that Dunham, who wanted to be compensated for those costs as well as for her living expenses, “filed a separate claim under her employer’s disability insurance policy.” It was that claim, with the insurance company CIGNA, that was denied in August 1995 because, CIGNA investigators said, Dunham’s condition was known before she was covered by the policy.
What’s the difference? Well, if Obama is using the story to illustrate the problems with health insurance coverage and it actually involves a job-related disability insurance policy, that’s a very different animal. What’s more, if a person is refused coverage for cancer treatment as a whole, this involves a huge amount of money and yes, it could easily bankrupt even a working person. But being refused coverage for the deductible and uncovered expenses, which apparently came to a couple of thousand dollars a year, is hardly the sort of story that’s required if the goal is to alarm people. So, best to imply that things were even worse.
If you go back and look at the Obama quotes above, you’ll note an interesting phenomenon: he never actually says that it was his mother’s health insurance company that denied coverage—although he’s using the argument in the health care coverage debate, and he has to know that almost every listener will assume that’s what he meant. Instead, he carefully uses the words “insurance” and the word “medical bills.”
Technically, it was insurance that was involved—but it was disability insurance. And technically, there were indeed uncovered medical bills—but they only involved a deductible and incidental and relatively minor payments. The bulk of the bills were paid, and by Dunham’s health insurance.
Ah, but maybe Obama just didn’t know the details. That might be true, except for one little thing—Scott reports that, after the disability payments were denied, Ann Dunham wrote the company (CIGNA) a letter saying that “she was turning over the case to ‘my son and attorney, Barack Obama.’” So we can assume that Obama was well aware of the facts. And technically, he’s not actually lying when he says she was trying to get money from insurance to pay for medical expenses. But to use the story to imply that she was denied health insurance coverage is purposely misleading—but being misleading is Obama’s specialty.
[NOTE: As far as bankrupting the family goes---in the 90s Obama was a professor at the University of Chicago, as well as an attorney at the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He was already married but he and Michelle had no children, and she was gainfully employed as well. Of course, it's not required that Obama pay his mother's health care cost overrun, but to claim that health care expenses of a few hundred dollars a month threatened to bankrupt "our family," as Obama stated, seems ludicrous.]
Posted by neo-neocon
