Obama’s Fables Sell Health Care To The Gullible
by Michelle Malkin
The tall-tale-teller-in-chief cited mom Stanley Ann Dunham’s deathbed fight with her insurer several times over the years to support his successful push to ban pre-existing condition exclusions by insurers. In a typical recounting, Obama shared his personalized trauma in a 2008 debate:
“For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”
But there was something fundamentally wrong with Obama’s story. In a recently published biography of Obama’s mother, author and New York Times reporter Janny Scott discovered that Dunham’s health insurer had in fact reimbursed her medical expenses with nary an objection. The actual coverage dispute centered on a separate disability insurance policy.
A White House spokesman insisted to the Times that the anecdote somehow still “speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs” — though Dunham’s primary health insurer did everything it was supposed to do and met all its contractual obligations.
I’ve discovered that this kind of fibbing is pretty much a standard Democrat strategy in re: the health care debate. Remember the LJ explosion over Melissa Mia Hall’s recent death? The fact that Hall could’ve easily walked into a number of hospitals in the Fort Worth area and received care and financial aid completely escaped these leftists’ attention. Why tell the truth if it’s politically inconvenient?