Tom Maguire does a stellar job at actual reporting here on the woman, whom Obama alleged, died because of the big bad health insurance companies and was then buried with a Obama shirt on.
All the more stellar since the MSM can’t be bothered to type in a few keywords on google:
Obama told the crowd that the woman had no health insurance, so viewed that way the Times reporting is literally accurate. However, the woman, Melanie Shouse, did in fact have insurance – she had a catastrophic policy with a $5,000 deductible and did not want to drop a few hundred bucks on a routine exam and a mammogram, despite feeling a lump in her breast at age 37.
Tom links to an interview with Shouse in which she said she took a gamble on insurance because she had just dropped 30 grand into a new business. She only took out catastrophic insurance in which the deductibles were high. She felt a lump but did not go to the doctor, once again gambling. Then, when she finally DID go see a doctor they told her what she already knew, cancer.
When she did seek care, she went straight to Siteman Cancer Center.
“By then, I could have been diagnosed from across the street. It wasn’t a surprise,” she said.
Stage 4 cancer was the diagnosis and while she does admit the delay in diagnosis was a problem, she doesn’t see that as the only problem:
My chance of survival was pegged at just 13% as a result of the delay in diagnosis and treatment caused by inadequate health coverage.
and now no insurance would accept her so medicaid paid for her treatment. After all this Tom has a few questions:
once diagnosed, she promptly availed herself of Medicaid. So why the wait – wouldn’t she have been eligible for Medicaid six months earlier (or whatever), or did the business have to falter first?
In a story cited below we learn that Ms. Shouse and her partner had just put $30,000 into their small business in 2004, so cash was tight when she noticed the lump. That would compare with the “monumental” annual expense of $10,000 in deductibles and co-pays.
In this video (she comes in at the two minute mark) Ms. Shouse says she ignored her problem for several years. If she was diagnosed in 2005, she suspected something was wrong in 2003. Wow – she had a lump in her breast but ignored it so she could max out her debt and open a store. Maybe based on her age and family history (with which I am not familiar) that made sense.
People’s World, Feb 4 does not add much.
We get more background on her financial situation from an interview last September:
So she admits that she suspected something was wrong in 2003, and instead of going to the doctor she instead dumped 30 grand into a business, one third of that could of paid the alleged deductible, then who is at fault here?
She took a gamble and loss. It’s sad. But to twist and spin this as if Socialism would of saved this woman’s life is absurd.
Thats not even accounting for the fact that with Socialized health care you get sub-par health care.
The whole story is absurd. From Obama using her as a pawn to push a program the majority of Americans DO NOT want, and then selling himself by telling the story about the t-shirt (in which she was cremated, NOT buried, but Obama is too busy to learn those basic facts….hell, he can’t even memorize her name) and then the MSM retelling the tale with no actual reporting being done.
If it wasn’t so sad all the way around this would be one big joke.
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