Obama Repeats Whopper About Mom's Health Insurance
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The Obama Record
The Obama Record: In a campaign infomercial, the president suggests his late mother's health insurer denied her coverage in her cancer battle. It's a heart-breaking story. Only it's not true.
About midway through the slick 17-minute video, "The Road We've Traveled," narrator Tom Hanks explains that Obama made enacting his health care reforms a top priority because "he knew from experience the cost of waiting."
"He remembered the millions of families like his who feel the pressure of rising costs and the fear of being denied or dropped from coverage," Hanks says, as photos of Obama and his late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, appear on the screen. Dunham died in 1995 after a bout with ovarian cancer.
Then the first lady chimes in about Dunham not having "good, consistent insurance," and the president himself adds that it "drained all her resources."
"That's a tough thing to deal with — watching your mother die of something that could have been prevented," Michelle Obama says. "I don't think he wants to see anyone go through that."
The suggestion is that a heartless U.S. health insurance industry denied the president's own mother medical coverage when she needed it most. And this not only bankrupted her, but sped her death.
The heart-tugging narrative echoes what Obama said during a 2008 presidential debate: "For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that."
He told the story again during a 2009 town hall meeting while selling his health care plan: "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."
All three accounts are fictional. A new book puts the lie to his story. According to "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," Dunham had an employer-provided health insurance policy that paid her hospital bills directly. Her insurer, Cigna, never denied payment for her cancer treatment.
The deathbed dispute was over disability coverage to replace lost wages, not medical coverage. But then Obama knew this. As his mother's lawyer, he reviewed all the insurance claims.
This isn't another case of Obama blurring the issue. This is the president deliberately deceiving the public to sell it socialized medicine. Worse, he used his late mother's tragedy to do it.
And it isn't the first time the president has exploited deceased family members (who aren't around for the media to challenge his accounts) for political gain.
During his 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia, Obama also told a story about his white grandmother and a black man at a bus stop to try to prove his point that America still clings to a racist past.
He claimed his grandmother, Madelyn "Toot" Dunham, "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street." In fact, there was a single incident in which Dunham came home scared after being accosted by, as she had put it at the time, a "very aggressive" black panhandler while waiting for a bus in Waikiki.
This wasn't any African-American passing her by on the street, as Obama made it seem. This was a large, menacing man who hassled her for money even after she gave him a dollar. She had reason to fear — not because he was black, but because he was a belligerent bum.
Obama left all this out of his story. This was not some off-the-cuff anecdote. He spent a lot of time preparing his remarks for what was a highly promoted speech on race, knowing full well millions of voters would be tuning in on national TV.
If he's willing to lie with cold calculation about his own family, what else is he capable of lying about?
