The White House--Home Of The Whopper

Barack Obama's latest lie designed to point out the hideous failings of private health insurance is all over the internet. So in the spirit of piling on, let me join them. The Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, love to tell horror stories about disembodied spiritual victims of private health insurance, but this time Obama went one victim too far. He cited the case of his own mother.

And a true horror story it is. As a cancer survivor, few words have more impact on me than that word--cancer. Obama's mother died of ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-three. She was the victim of a private insurance system that denied her coverage because the cancer was a pre-existing condition. Says the Heart-Render-in-Chief: "For my mother to die of cancer 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 for her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that."

He's right. There is something fundamentally wrong, all right. Not with the treatment, however, but with the story. In fact, the insurer made not a peep about her cancer treatment, and paid for every procedure, the hospital and the doctors. The actual problem revolved around an entirely separate and unconnected disability insurance claim that in no way affected her medical treatment. I'm sure that if a brave news reporter questions him hard on this whopper, he will raise the Al Sharpton defense: "OK, it wasn't true. But it could have been."

One White House spokesman who was asked about the fable replied: "The President's story speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs." How, pray tell? I can twist this story a dozen different ways, and I still can't make it apply to pre-existing conditions or denial of coverage. But then I'm not as accomplished a liar as Barack Obama, and I didn't get my law degree from Harvard.

Even if there were a grain of truth to the story, I would still have some questions. ". . . the last months of her life in the hospital arguing with insurance companies." She died in 1995. Sonny Boy was licensed to practice law in 1991. Couldn't he have done the arguing for her and given her a little peace while she was being denied coverage? Was he too busy community-organizing? Was he too busy litigating unlawful detainers (evictions) on the South Side of Chicago? Was he too busy making political connections to call on his legal connections? Was he too busy taking golf lessons? Inquiring minds want to know. This sad story just got a whole lot less sad.

The Democrats have told insurance (or lack of insurance) horror stories that range from an Illinois cancer patient being left untreated because he didn't report a prior gallstone problem to his insurer (untrue), to dragging out an eleven-year old boy to boo-hoo publicly about his mother dying of pulmonary hypertension left untreated by heartless doctors and insurers (also not true). There was the breast cancer patient who lost her private insurance because she didn't declare her prior history of acne. Except that what she didn't declare was her previous heart condition and morbid obesity. But on review, the insurer covered her anyway. Then there's the unemployed sawmill worker who was denied treatment for a serious neurological condition because he didn't have insurance. In fact, he received excellent treatment at the Oregon Health and Science University which accepts Medicaid as payment in full. The sawmill worker was on Medicaid.

As a retired private attorney, I know that there are genuine denial-of-coverage cases. But most are complicated, hard to explain in soundbites, and rarely as dramatic as the stories told by the socialized medicine crowd. Still, at least some of those cases would have made good propaganda, if the Democrats had bothered to investigate honestly. But a scripted, "could be true" story is so much better than reality.

Speaking of pre-existing conditions, I wonder if the President's health insurance policy covers pre-existing mental illness, to wit: the utter inability to tell the truth combined with the obsessive need to tell lies even when the truth would work just as well. Perhaps it's a genetically-transmitted disease. After all, the President's grandmother was a typical white person.