Calling out Obama’s faulty health care anecdotes
Scott Harrington in the WSJ spotlights two misleading health care anecdotes President Obama used in his joint address to Congress last week.
Will the health care czar be posting one of her reality check videos on this?
No, not bloody likely, I know:
To highlight abusive practices, Mr. Obama referred to an Illinois man who “lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found he hadn’t reported gallstones that he didn’t even know about.” The president continued: “They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.”
Although the president has used this example previously, his conclusion is contradicted by the transcript of a June 16 hearing on industry practices before the Subcommittee of Oversight and Investigation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The deceased’s sister testified that the insurer reinstated her brother’s coverage following intervention by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She testified that her brother received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week “window of opportunity” from “one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine,” that the procedure “was extremely successful,” and that “it extended his life nearly three and a half years.”
The president’s second example was a Texas woman “about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne.” He said that “By the time she had her insurance reinstated, her breast cancer more than doubled in size.”
The woman’s testimony at the June 16 hearing confirms that her surgery was delayed several months. It also suggests that the dermatologist’s chart may have described her skin condition as precancerous, that the insurer also took issue with an apparent failure to disclose an earlier problem with an irregular heartbeat, and that she knowingly underreported her weight on the application.
These two cases are presumably among the most egregious identified by Congressional staffers’ analysis of 116,000 pages of documents from three large health insurers, which identified a total of about 20,000 rescissions from millions of policies issued by the insurers over a five-year period. Company representatives testified that less than one half of one percent of policies were rescinded (less than 0.1% for one of the companies).
If existing laws and litigation governing rescission are inadequate, there clearly are a variety of ways that the states or federal government could target abuses without adopting the president’s agenda for federal control of health insurance, or the creation of a government health insurer.
More on the Raddatz case here.
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Categories: Health care
LIAR!
It’s been my contention for years that we need government to judiciously protect our contractual rights, including those with health insurers.
Putting the government in charge of health care takes down our last line of defense.
Governing by untrue anecdote – how lovely.
I assumed he was lying, since he lies about everything else. The least trusted man in the U.S. is the POTUS. How frightening is that????
These politicians just take snippets of stories that fit their mantra. They need to have the person they are talking about standing next to them if the story is to be believed.
Health Care needs to be a 10th Amendment States Rights issue. Arizona will have an initiative on the ballot that forbids the Feds from imposing their health care programs on the citizens of AZ. We have already done it with Title XVIIII Exemption which is Medicare. We have Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System–which needs work but only because of Federal mandates. Look at what Texas did. Passed Tort Reform and the Doctors flowed, and are still moving there. All States need to follow suit. We need to “lobby” our own legislators to fix what is broken in our own States and tell the Feds to BUTT OUT!!
Lies and the lying liars who tell them……. Failing truth and logic, bamboozle them with bullcrap.
If Duh One said the sky is blue and the grass is green I’d go look at it myself.
Coming from the man who thinks people should just take pills instead of receiving expensive treatment, how can anyone take his scare tactics seriously?
You know what would be fun? Well, okay, maybe not fun, but certainly challenging, would be to search for things that Obama told the TRUTH about. You know, in context and everything.
OH, I know one! Where he likened Obamacare to the Post Office…
So, let me get this straight: does this mean that pretty much every one of this idiot’s assertions in his Joint Session speech was wrong?
Has anything he said been “fact-checked” and turned out to be correct?
How stupid can he be to say in a speech something that is directly contradicted by testimony to Congress? Or, probably more to the point, how stupid does he think we are?
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…….
WSJ = VRWC
Obummer: “They delayed his treatment…”
Fact: (He) received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week “window of opportunity” from “one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine”
Obummer: “…and he died because of it.”
Fact: the procedure “was extremely successful,” and that “it extended his life nearly three and a half years.”
Conclusion: YOU LIE!
By Choice said: “These politicians just take snippets of stories that fit their mantra. They need to have the person they are talking about standing next to them if the story is to be believed.”
And have the name on a bracelet as a cheat note while delivering the speech.
Wow. I fully expect ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC to expose this as their lead story.
/sarc
Interesting that Obama said the man was denied because of unreported gallstones when the aortic aneurysm is so much more serious. I always like to say that Pelossi is the twit. Maybe she should relinquish the tile.
And embellish them as necessary.
BHO finds these obscure heath insurance stories, twists them and then uses them to justify throwing out the entire health insurance structure in favor of his plan of the week. All of his lies are the smoke screen to cover up the power grab he and the elites want. None of this will actually fix any of the problems in the system. He can’t keep all his lies straight either.
I have never seen anyone in public office, much less a President tell the out and out lies Obama does.
He is a disgrace to his office. Fear and lies are no tools a President should use to lead this country.
OK, someone HAD to put this quote up.
For one’s edification, this report just came out:
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/09/14/cancer-drugs.html
http://convio.cancer.ca/site/PageServer?pagename=GEN_CAN_fight_access_facts
It’s a perfect system at all.
Obama blatently lies and continues to get away with it. Amazing. But his target audience is partially to blame.
The average citizen does not pay attention to these things. Obama knows they know more about American Idol than the topics he addresses and he makes a calculated decision to assert these falsehoods.
They voted for him and still refuse to believe or admit they made a huge mistake. They still have a chance to correct their mistake by not allowing him to be dishonest. So far, they have not been up to the challenge.
T-Bone- They will have a chance to make up for their mistake in 2010. If they vote the same majority of democrats into office in 2010? Then it wasn’t a mistake, it was intentional.
What makes this even worse is that the KBPOTUS will get a lifetime pension after just serving one 4year term in office while a person in the military has to serve 20 years just to a pittance of what the he will get.
GSP
Obama is all rhetoric providing camouflage for a pile of liberal ideological crap.
quick….someone flag him to the White House healthcare czar for misleading information…..
He’s still campaigning! Good grief.
gunslinger it does make the blood run hot thinking we will be paying for this clown for 30 to 50 years, and of course the msm will have him on as an expert at the drop of a hat.
MSM? He will be in foreign countries doing negotiations ala Carter, and Clinton.
Conservatives tend to use facts and surveys to extrapolate the number of people similiarly affected.
Liberals take one questionable anectote and assume millions are similiarly affected.
If you like what the Federal Reserve System has done for banking
You will love what this Federal “Fill in the blank” System does for insurance
One more ponzi scheme enshrined by government
kinda like acorn and seiu..eh?
Seriously, you just nailed it. I Won will say anything in an effort to scare us into accepting his agenda.
And in that vein, consider the words of economist Thomas Sowell: