Why Does Obama Want To Raise Natoma Canfield's Health Insurance Costs?
Cancer patient Natoma Canfield is today's latest hostage for health care Obama is holding up, that despite possibly breaking the law in releasing a private letter from her to the media back on March 5th.
He'll speak Monday at a recreation and senior center in Strongsville, outside Cleveland.
Strongsville is the home of cancer patient Natoma Canfield, who wrote the president she gave up her health insurance after it rose to $8,500 a year. Canfield's sister, Connie Anderson, is scheduled to introduce the president at the event.
A reference to the HIPAA issue via a previous NRO post. But we know the laws don't apply to Democrats, especially when trying to score political points with misinformation.
According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Mrs. Natoma Canfield of Medina, Ohio, had just written a letter to the president describing her plight. Fifty years old, Mrs. Canfield was employed when she was diagnosed with cancer 16 years ago. Twelve years ago, she lost her job, took COBRA benefits, and then migrated to an individual policy (likely under Ohio law, which guarantees her access to either and Ohio Basic or Ohio Standard plan, without underwriting). I hope this was a set-up. (If it wasn't, I suspect that Mr. Gibbs and perhaps even the president have violated the privacy provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, but we'll let the lawyers worry about that.)
Also, as NRO points out, it's government regulation that led to Canfield's premiums going up in the first place - not that we can expect Obama to employ facts when making a misleading emotional appeal meant to keep him from looking like the failure he's been so far.
The president's response to Mrs. Canfield should have gone something like this:
"I regret that the tax policies of the United States government make it impossible for health insurers to pool risks properly, like they do for life insurance. Life insurance policies, which are owned by individuals, offer fixed premiums.
If the government stopped discriminating against individual ownership of health insurance, instead of favoring employer ownership, health insurers would be able and motivated to offer insurance policies that guaranteed long-term premium increases no greater than the increase in overall medical costs. Unfortunately, because the median individual health-insurance policy only lasts for three years, people like yourself, who have had individual insurance for over a decade, lose the benefits of long-term risk pooling.
The reality is, what Obama is proposing is only going to drive her costs up even more, assuming her business generates an acceptable level of income in the first place. That's precisely what happened after the implementation of universal coverage in Massachusetts. But Obama knows he can't get his way based upon the facts. Misleading the public and playing on their heart strings is the only way he can sell his bad bill. Kill the bill and perhaps even save the Natoma Canfield's of the world from the even higher costs they will see under Obama Care - if we could enact some prudent reforms before getting the government out of the way. That's the compassionate thing to do, along with the truth.
Just a year after the universal coverage law passed, The New York Times reported, state insurers were already jacking up rates to twice the national average. According to Dr. Paul Hsieh, a physician and founding member of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, 43 mandatory benefits — including those that many people did not want or need, such as invitro fertilization — raised the costs of coverage for Massachusetts residents by as much as 56 percent, depending upon an individual’s income status. So much for “affordable” health care.
