Your mother lies dying in the hospital, unable to work because of her Stage 3 uterine and ovarian cancer. While her medical procedures are largely covered by her health insurance plan, there is a large deductible and several hundred dollars of unpaid expenses each month. The insurance company is not honoring her disability insurance because a doctor had written in her medical file that she suspected uterine cancer a couple of months before she started her job. However, your mother claims that that information was not shared with her. And, in any case, it was only a suspicion. Your mother asks you to take over the job of fighting the insurance company. That is what happened to Barack Obama and his mother. And that is what just earned the president three pinocchios from the Washington Post.
Why has the president been lying about his mother’s death? Well, according to the Washington Post he has been deliberately suggesting that his mother was denied funds for her medical care from her health insurance, not her disability insurance. This is supposedly a big distinction.
The president has a strong recollection of watching his mother fight with an insurance company about covering the cost of her health care because of her supposedly pre-existing condition. He thinks this is a terrible injustice and not a way to die with dignity. It inspires him to fight so that other people will not face the same or similar situations.
But it turns out to be insincere political posturing because his mother’s “pre-existing condition” only prevented her from receiving the money she needed to pay her deductible and the fees not covered by her health insurance. That this is an example of an insurance company going to whatever lengths it can to deny payment is supposedly irrelevant or misleading.
Does the Washington Post want to look the president in the face and tell him that the way his mother was treated by an insurance company while she was dying isn’t personal?
I doubt they’d have the lack of decency to do that. But they’ll do the same thing in the pages of their paper.
