I got a letter -- I got a note today from one of my staff -- they forwarded it to me -- from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn't have insurance. She couldn't afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she's going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.
There is a lot more to this than the President is telling and these details tell us everything about Obamacare.
The missing details are that she did have some health care - she had catastrophic care coverage which has a very high deductible. Why didn't she have better insurance? Because she and her husband were using all available cash to start up a business. Like many young people, they took a gamble. They got enough insurance to cover a major illness and hoped that nothing else would come up.
She took a second, more serious gamble. She knew that she had breast lumps and she gambled that they were harmless. There are unknowns here. Would she have had the lumps checked in time if she had insurance that covered doctor visits and testing? Maybe so, maybe not. Regardless, by the time her cancer was diagnosed, it had spread all over her body.
She did have Medicaid by then but she was told that one treatment her doctor recommended was not covered. The article I linked to doesn't say what it was. It may have been an experimental program - lots of people enroll in these. It may have been something more mainstream. Whatever it was, she was already doomed. Once cancer stats invading multiple organs it is unstoppable by today's medicine.
So, where does Obamacare fit into this? If it had passed then she would either have put her money into insurance instead of her business or she would have still gone for the catastrophic policy and paid the fine for being under-insured. No one with enough money to start a business should be getting government assistance in paying for coverage. That might sound cruel, but that's how Obamacare will work. A very large percentage of the people it is aimed at will be required to purchase coverage but will not get any assistance for it.
I doubt that this is what she expected or why she wanted to be buried in her Obama T shirt. I suspect that, like many supporters of health care reform, she thought that the government would pay for her insurance. Since she government gets its money from other people, she wanted other people to pay for her insurance. That isn't going to happen with Obamacare for most of the uninsured. There just isn't enough money.
So we have a woman who died believing that Obama would deliver something that he will not and Obama is using her belief in him to try to shame the country into passing Obamacare.
Can we wrap this legislation in an Obama T shirt and bury it, too?
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