During his 1996 reelection campaign, President Bill Clinton
famously recounted “vivid and painful memories of black churches
being burned in my own state when I was a child.” It was a moving
story, and it helped shore up his sagging support among minority
voters. It was also a lie. As the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette and a variety of other publications pointed
out at the time, no such atrocities had occurred in Arkansas during
Slick Willie’s formative years. Until recently, Clinton’s
church-burning whopper appeared to be the most egregious modern
example of crass and cynical prevarication by a presidential
candidate. It has, however, now been supplanted by President
Obama’s oft-repeated tale about his mother’s fictional struggle
with her health insurance company while she was battling
cancer.
Throughout his 2008 presidential bid, Obama attributed his
passion for health care reform to painful memories of his mother’s
battle with a health insurance company that allegedly tried to
avoid paying her medical bills on the pretext that her disease
predated her coverage. He used her image in a campaign ad as far
back as September of 2007, and he often told the tale during his
primary battle with Hillary Clinton. In a New Hampshire
debate he phrased it thus: “When I think about health care, I
think about my mother, who, when she was dying of cancer, had to
read an insurance form because she had just gotten a new job and
they were trying to figure out whether or not this was going to be
treated as a preexisting condition and whether or not they would
pay her medical bills.”
Like Bill Clinton’s anecdote about charred black churches,
the story of Obama’s mother was moving. And, like Clinton’s tale,
it was a work of fiction. Questions were
raised about the accuracy of this tale as soon as Obama began
peddling it, but the “news” media ignored them and he continued to
repeat it even after he had been elected President. He included it,
for example, in a 2009
speech to the AMA: “I will never forget watching my own mother…
worrying about whether her insurer would claim her illness was a
preexisting condition.” And, during the height of the ObamaCare
debate, he told the attendees of a town hall meeting, “I will never
forget my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final months,
having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for
her treatment.”
Now, the President’s veracity concerning his mother’s
dealings with her health insurance company has once again been
questioned in a new biography of Ann Dunham. Author
Janny Scott writes, in A Singular Woman: The
Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, that there
was never any attempt by Ann Dunham’s health insurance company to
deny payment for her medical bills. Scott is a former reporter for
that notorious hive of wingnuts and Tea Partiers, the New York
Times, and her book makes it clear that Obama’s mother had
health insurance through her job and that it covered her medical
treatment: “[T]he 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.”
Like all truly effective lies, however, there is a tiny
kernel of truth to Obama’s story. Even the best health insurance
policies, such as those enjoyed by members of labor unions that
supported the President during his campaign, include deductibles —
a cost-sharing mechanism designed to bring down monthly premiums
and prevent over-utilization of health services. In 1995, when
Obama’s mother was hospitalized, this feature was typical of a well
designed health insurance plan. Instead of turning to her son, who
by that time had the resources to help her, Dunham apparently tried
to defray her deductible as well as her living expenses by
obtaining payment through a separate disability policy.
That claim was indeed denied because her condition was already
well-documented before that policy had gone into effect.
Twelve years after these unhappy events, Ann Dunham’s son
needed a useful campaign narrative that would support his plan to
impose government-run health care on an unwilling electorate. Thus,
Obama deliberately rearranged the facts of his mother’s “battle”
with the insurance company to make it appear that the evil minions
of the health care industrial complex had foully mistreated his
poor widowed mother when she was dying of cancer. This allowed him
to tell audience after audience that the struggle for universal
health care was, for him, an intensely “personal” crusade and to
claim that he would never rest until such wrongs had been righted.
Like most pathological liars, he probably began to believe the tale
himself after telling it several hundred times.
Nonetheless, it was indeed a lie. Not that this matters a
whit to Obama’s allies in the mainstream media. They continue to
ignore or brush off this tawdry tale. The very people who accused
George W. Bush of “lying us into war” because he made a poor verb
choice in a United Nations speech tell us that Obama’s egregious
whopper about his mother only matters to desperate conservatives
trying to bring down the President. The
reaction of Salon is typical: “The RedState/TownHall
crowd is feasting on this Obama ‘lie.’ And why wouldn’t they? If
Bill Clinton was an all-you-can-eat buffet of half-truths and
scandals, Saint Barack of Chicago has been nothing but thin gruel
all the way.” In reality, of course, precisely the reverse is true.
The man rarely opens his mouth without telling some
stretcher.
Throughout the ObamaCare debate, he consistently lied
about his ultimate intentions, the cost and the contents of the
legislation. And since its passage, he has told whopper after
whopper about the benefits of PPACA. In fact, his predilection for
prevarication has been one of the reasons it has been so difficult
for the GOP to put together deals with the White House on Medicare
reform, the debt limit and a variety of other serious issues. No
one with any sense believes anything he says. How can one trust a
man who deliberately and repeatedly lied about the death of his own
mother for cheap political gain? “Saint Barack of Chicago” is so
profoundly dishonest that even a grifter like Bill Clinton seems
trustworthy in comparison.
