Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Oh my, the liberals are in an uproar that we are daring…DARING…to call bulls&%t on this SCHIP family the Democrats pulled out of their hat this last weekend.  My favorite comment on this KOS post sums it up:

Yes, they better not have a “high net worth value” before our society decides to assist them with anything for their kids healthcare bills. Bills that by my estimates most likely would be in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands and that might also result in the bankruptcy of even the most average middle class family that possessed health insurance coverage. Yup, the family should have been forced to suffer more (despite the fact the kids are lucky to be alive and will have lifelong issues to deal with from the TBI’s they sustained).

Yes, these people should be forced to suffer and struggle some more….they should have had to sell their small family business and been forced to give up the breadwinner’s income (and he should go work at McWal-mart) …because that is what a humane society insists upon before they provide them with healthcare assistance. Yup and they should have been forced to sell and move out of their house (that had most likely risen in value subtantially like most homes over the past decade did due to the housing bubble)and sold their granite counter tops and been forced to moved into a Section 8 funded apartment because gawd forbid they better most certainly be struggling before those kids and this family were aided by our American society in any way shape or form. That’s the spirit….the American way.

I’m sorry if I sound angry and sarcastic here, (because I am after reading this post)….but perhaps you just don’t fully understand just what this family went through. I have no personal knowledge of this family, but worked in a TBI rehab unit for many years….and it is one of those traumatic medical issues that can just devastate and rip apart people and their families in many many ways and not always just financially.

This is just another Mary Ann Knowles:

Repeatedly throughout his campaign, Kerry has held up Hudson resident Mary Ann Knowles as an example of President Bush’s failure to ensure adequate health care for all Americans (as if a President can do such a thing). Here is what he said during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last month:

“What does it mean when Mary Ann Knowles, a woman with breast cancer I met in New Hampshire, had to keep working day after day right through her chemotherapy, no matter how sick she felt, because she was terrified of losing her family’s health insurance? America can do better. And help is on the way.”

Thing is, Mary Ann Knowles did not have to work through her chemotherapy to keep her health insurance. In fact, she has great health insurance, which includes 26 weeks of paid disability leave.

Knowles chose to work through most, but not all, of her chemotherapy because her husband was out of a job. (Kerry said she had to work “every day” of her chemotherapy. His campaign chalked that lie up to “a colloquialism.”)

She and husband John did not want to take the pay cut that would have come with disability leave, so Mary Ann kept working. But that is not how Kerry tells the story. He deliberately misstates her situation, saying she would have lost her health coverage if she took a single day off.

Another Winifred Skinner:

It brings tears to your eyes. Here’s this adorable, elderly woman out in Iowa who’s so sick and so poor, that in order to pay for medicines she needs to stay alive, she has to scavenge in a local dump yard for cast-off tin cans.

~~~

Mrs. Skinner, who first told her story at a Gore campaign event in Altoona, Iowa, repeated her sad story Tuesday to the nation at large — or Mr. Gore repeated it for her.

~~~

As it happens, despite the impression given by Vice President Gore, Mrs. Skinner is not an itinerant hobo. She is not living “hand to mouth” as reported by Mr. Gore, but quite comfortably as the mother of a well-to-do businessman, Earl King, a successful specialist in heating and air conditioning. Mr. King and his wife, in addition to his routine work, raise horses (not a poor man’s hobby) on a farm west of Des Moines. They have made available to Mrs. Skinner a 900-square-foot Des Moines apartment where she would be welcome to live, but she prefers her old home.

~~~

“She gets a small pension,” he said. “But in order to pay for her prescription drug benefits she has to go out seven days a week, several hours a day, picking up cans.”

It turns out, as the statement was rectified, Mrs. Skinner goes out zero days a week, for zero hours a day, and that she was only speaking “in the name of” people she assumes must do this. But in whose name was the vice-president speaking in his closing sentences of the debate? Apparently no one’s.

Or Jennifer Bush:

…Jennifer’s mother wrote a widely-publicized letter to the White House. “Do you know what it is like to choose between purchasing groceries for the week to feed your family or buying needed medications for your chronically ill child?” Kathleen Bush asked. Pale and wan, young Jennifer suffered from unidentified chronic digestive problems and myriad ailments from birth. She had her gall bladder, appendix, and fragments of her intestines removed. Those organs were replaced with a tangled cable of feeding tubes that constricted Jennifer’s 43-pound frame. Surgeons threaded a catheter into the girl’s heart. After 200 hospital visits and 40 operations, the Bush family had racked up medical bills worth more than $2 million.

~~~

Politicians unquestioningly embraced the Bushes and their tale of need. Hillary cuddled with seven-year-old Jennifer for the cameras; their mugs were splashed on the pages of USA Today and newspapers across the country. Shamelessly coached, Jennifer gave the Clintons a lucky silver dollar “to bring you good luck so everyone can have good insurance.” In another pre-programmed, kiddie-sized soundbite, Jennifer dutifully told the press: “I pray every night that I can get better - and that everyone can have insurance.”

~~~

But who was strangling whom? Several years before Hillary deified Mrs. Bush and elevated Jennifer to poster-child stardom, suspicious medical professionals had already begun questioning the mother’s role in making her “beautiful little angel” sick. Nurses complained that Mrs. Bush was force-feeding her child with unnecessary seizure drugs that made her vomit. Independent specialists conducted extensive tests on Jennifer and found no evidence of digestive disorders. When Jennifer was separated from her mother for treatment at a Cincinnati hospital, the starved child feasted mightily on pizza, hot dogs, and chocolate bars. Meanwhile, authorities discovered that while the Bush family claimed poverty because of Jennifer’s health problems, they had splurged on trips to the Bahamas and Disney World, house remodeling, and a new Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

~~~

…[In February 2000], Kathleen Bush – Hillary Clinton’s once-proud and loud sister in arms — was sentenced to five years in prison on two counts of aggravated child abuse and one count of fraud. She also pled guilty to a separate count of welfare fraud for misrepresenting $60,000 in assets on Medicaid forms. “There was probably more abuse in this single case,” lead prosecutor Bob Nichols noted, “than in all of the child-abuse cases I’ve prosecuted in my life combined.”

Mrs. Bush’s behavior is an extreme example of the Nanny State opportunism to which Hillary Clinton has dedicated her life. It’s enough to make you sick.

That’s all this is.  The Democrats chose to roll out a little kid to shamelessly plug for socialized medicine and its backfiring once more.  Because any family that can afford a new SUV, a remodeled kitchen with granite countertops, tuition to private schools can damn well afford the 500 bucks a month for insurance.  Will they have to do without on some things?  Sure.  Life is all about priorities.  But as a business owner the father decided to spend their money on other things rather then insurance, and now look who paid for it.  The taxpayers.

And where the hell was the auto insurance anyways?  Did he not add medical to it?

UPDATE

Mark Steyn:

…So executive vice-presidents’ families are now the new new poor? I support lower taxes for the Frosts, increased child credits for the Frosts, an end to the “death tax” and other encroachments on transgenerational wealth transfer, and even severe catastrophic medical-emergency aid of one form or other. But there is no reason to put more and more middle-class families on the government teat, and doing so is deeply corrosive of liberty.