Obama Co-opts, And Corrupts, Story Of His Dying Mother and Her Insurance Plight

http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/07/fresh-doubt-cast-obamas-health-care-story

Fresh Doubt Cast On Obama's Health Care Story

By: Byron York

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama often discussed his mother's struggle with cancer. Ann Dunham spent the months before her death in 1995, Obama said, fighting with insurance companies that sought to deny her the coverage she needed to pay for treatment.

"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.

"The insurance companies were saying, 'Maybe there's a pre-existing condition and we don't have to pay your medical bills,' " Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.

It was a simple and powerful story, one Obama would tell many more times as president during the national health care debate. But now we're learning the real story of Ann Dunham's health coverage is not quite what her son made it out to be.

The news is in "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," a generally admiring new biography written by former New York Times reporter Janny Scott. According to the book, Ann Dunham, an anthropologist who spent most of her working life in Indonesia, moved from Jakarta to New York in 1992 to work for a nonprofit called Women's World Banking, which encouraged micro-lending in Third World countries. Unhappy in New York, in 1994 Dunham took a job with an American company called Development Alternatives, which had a contract with the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women. Dunham returned to Jakarta to work, and Scott reports the job provided Dunham with health insurance, a housing allowance, and a car.

At the time she took the job, Dunham was increasingly worried about her health; she was suffering from intense abdominal pains. In November 1994, Dunham went to an Indonesian doctor who diagnosed appendicitis. As Dunham debated whether to leave the country for surgery, she called her boss at Development Alternatives. "You've got health insurance, that's taken care of," the boss told her. "We can cover the airfare."

Dunham decided to stay in Jakarta, where she underwent an appendectomy. But the pain did not go away, and Dunham feared, correctly, that she was terribly ill. In January 1995 she left Indonesia to go home to Honolulu, where she was diagnosed with advanced uterine and ovarian cancer. She began a regime of surgery and chemotherapy.

That is the time during which Obama says his mother battled insurance companies to cover her illness. But Scott, who had access to Dunham's correspondence from the time, reveals that Dunham unquestionably had health coverage. "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.

Dunham protested the decision and, Scott writes, "informed CIGNA that she was turning over the case to 'my son and attorney, Barack Obama.' " CIGNA did not budge.

In September 1995, Dunham traveled to New York for an evaluation at the renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Returning to Hawaii, she began a new course of treatment. She died in November.

A dozen years later, her son turned her ordeal into a campaign pitch for national health care. But the story Obama told, Scott writes, was "abbreviated" -- the abbreviation was to leave out the fact that Ann Dunham had health insurance that paid for her treatment. "Though he often suggested that she was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition," Scott writes, "it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage."

That's a different story altogether. One the president never told.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/07/fresh-doubt-cast-obamas-health-care-story#ixzz1RwFKh9Bt
Copyright © 2011 by Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy

It's Official

My new site is up at WordPress. Thanks again to Uppity and Nunly for the encohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuragement to move over there. I have added this blog to the Blogroll for Archives sake, but as of today, it is up and running.

Here is the link to Rabblerouserruminations' Weblog. Please bookmark it.

I will be writing at the other site exclusively from now on, though given all that is going on right now, likely not every day (I also will be on vacation again in 10 days, so there's that).

In any event, I hope you will come join me at the other site. It is more user-friendly, especially to make comments. See you soon!

New Construction *Open Thread*

Hey, Friends -

I am working on changing my blog site to WordPress, and away from Google's "Blogger" for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are: 1. my good buddy, Uppity, suggested I do so; 2. because Google attaches a bunch of cookies to people who visit; and 3. it can be a real pain in the butt for people to leave comments. In all honesty, I should have done this ages ago, and I apologize that I did not. So, while I work on setting up the other site, this one will continue to be available.

While I am at the housekeeping portion of this post, I also want to give fair warning that I will be undergoing more knee surgery next month. Unfortunately, that seems to be the only way to determine exactly what is going on in there that is making my pain worse now than it was before. As it is, concentrating on actually writing posts has become increasingly difficult, so expect my posting to be a little more sporadic in the time leading up to the surgery, and for a bit afterward.

Okay. Enough about me. Here are a couple of stories that really caught my eye. First up is the new talking point by the Democrats that it is all the Tea Party's fault for our downgraded credit rating. Because, you know, it just makes sense to blame the people who want to rein in spending and decrease our debt for this rating, right? Uh, yeah, if you are Obama puppeteer David Axelrod, or the last Democrat for whom I ever voted because I was a Yellow Dog Dem even though I couldn't stand him, John Kerry. Wow. The lack of logic there is just staggering.

Let me understand this. The Democrats refused to prepare a budget for over two years because they knew the debt ceiling discussion would necessarily come up, and kept spending like drunken Congresspeople, ballooning our debt more and more, and somehow, it is the fault of a few people from the Tea Party in Congress? What a crock.

Then there is this astonishing story just out now: Jacqueline Kennedy (Onassis) believed it was Lyndon B. Johnson who caused the death of her husband, JFK. Check that - had JFK killed:

[snip] In the tapes, to be broadcast by ABC, Kennedy reveals her belief that Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons orchestrated the murder of her husband by gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.[snip]

Holy crappydoo - that is massive.

And finally, my thoughts and prayers go out to the families, friends, and fellow troops after the tremendous loss of 30 of our finest this past weekend in Afghanistan. Such a tragic event in terms of how it happened, and that it happened. To lose so many members of the elite Seal Team Six is just mind boggling. My heart just breaks for all of those affected personally by this tragedy, and for us all, as this impacts us, too.

For them, for their families, I leave you with this:

Where Have All The Girls Gone?

Debra Saunders had a disturbing piece up at the San Francisco Chronicle recently. In the midst of all of the haggling, blaming, and name calling going on at the Hill, this may not seem like an exciting, gotcha kind of story, but it is an important one, and highlights a situation that will have a long term, global impact.

Here is the story, as detailed in Saunders' piece,
In This Brave New World, Girls Disappear:

The world is becoming unbalanced. In pockets across the globe, women are giving birth to too many boys. In China, the sex ratio is 121 boys to 100 girls. In India, it's 112 to 100. Sex selection also is a force in the Balkans, Armenia and Georgia. In her eye-opening book, "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," journalist Mara Hvistendahl estimates that ultrasound and abortion have "claimed over 160 million potential women and girls - in Asia alone." That's more than the entire female population of the United States.

If you think that scarcity makes women more valuable, you are right - but that does not mean females benefit. As "surplus men" have trouble finding mates, young girls are forced into prostitution. Others are forced into arranged marriages. On Taiwan's eBay, Hvistendahl finds three Vietnamese women for sale for $5,400.

Those women who do well economically in the new order sadly are more likely to abort daughters in favor of sons.

Is this not disconcerting? Not only are girls being aborted in greater numbers by choice, but the decreased numbers of girls does not translate to girls being treated better. Not even close, unfortunately. Most disturbing is that women are buying into this mindset, and how that is made manifest.

Saunders points out, though, that this isn't just bad for women:

The results are equally bleak for men. Many boys grow up knowing they are unlikely to marry and start a family. In two years, 1 in 10 Chinese men will lack a female counterpart. The Chinese have a term - fenquing for "angry youth" - to describe the legions of young men likely to grow old alone. They find release in places like the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar, "where for the price of a few drinks, customers can pummel one of the bar's hired hands." In that equation, both men are losers.

In three decades, Vietnam - a poor country that provides brides and kidnapped prostitutes to affluent overly male nations - will have 4.3 million surplus men.

Holy cow. The difference the shortage of women will make in such a brief period of time is astonishing.

Saunders touches on the path of good intentions, whose result seem to fulfill the old adage paves the path to hell:

Hvistendahl finds no shortage of villains in this story. There's China's one-child policy, which resulted in untold forced abortions. Western governments and charities threw money at family-planning efforts to stem population growth in Asia, with little concern to the methods - forced sterilizations and abortions - employed. Then there are the willing participants - doctors, nurses and parents - who choose to engage in female feticide. French demographer Christophe Guilmoto recalls an Indian woman who was livid because she had aborted a boy after a doctor misdiagnosed the gender of her fetus.

I was struck at the distortion of good intentions. Family planning does promote prosperity, while overpopulation is unhealthy and destabilizing. Researchers develop technologies to help families. But in a world where technology moves faster than ethical thinking, giving would-be parents the gender they prefer is good business. So you get fertility clinics like the Los Angeles outfit that advertises, "Be certain your next child will be the gender you're hoping for."

Of course, sex-selection abortions happen in America, often among immigrant families. Hvistendahl reports that 35 percent of Asian American pregnancies result in abortion. [snip]

Oh, yes - definitely "good intentions" paved the way to this hell, which affects girls on a massive scale. And the numbers are just staggering.

Saunders concludes with the following:

[snip] Canadian sociologist Sharada Srinivasan has another suggestion. As she told Hvistendahl, at some point, feminists have to define sex selection as a human rights abuse. That would be a good start. (Click here to read the rest.)

Yes, it would be a good place to start - it is a human rights abuse, and the sooner we start dealing with it as such, the better.

I will leave you as Saunders did in her piece, with the following quotes. These should get your blood a-pumping: Thoughts On Parenthood

"You can choose whether to be a parent, but once you choose to be a parent, you cannot choose whether it's a boy or girl, black or white, tall or short."

- Delhi gynecologist Puneet Bedi

"Better 500 rupees now than 500,000 later."

- Mumbai ultrasound ad

"Less than $5 invested in population control is worth $100 invested in economic growth."

- President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a 1965 speech in San Francisco Copyright © 2011 by Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy

This Says It All *Updated*

I received the following photos from my friend, Artemis, this morning. I think this sums up perfectly the difference between who we could have had, and who we have.

Hillary Clinton in the rain:



And then there is Obama in the rain:



Enough said, though feel free to share your opinions!

UPDATE: Apologies for not having the photo credits, but the friend who sent the email let me know she got the photos from our friend, Uppity Woman's site (where Uppity got them from, I don't know). Uppity has an outstanding post along the lines of this one (though better - Uppity Woman ROCKS). Here is the link to, "He's Stolen Everything ELSE, But He Can't Steal My HOPE!" Copyright © 2011 by Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy