Just when I thought I’d written my last post on Julie Boonstra, I read Kenneth Thomas’s post below, from Sunday. The only comment to that post–mine, which I just posted–reads:
How very, very, very sad that there was no ACA during his years of leukemia treatments and hospitalizations, and that we still do not have single-payer.
And how ironic that he had the very same fatal illness that Julie Boonstra has. I’d like to shove your post in her face, Kenneth.
I’d also like to see Rep. Gary Peters use this family’s situation in his Senate campaign ads in Michigan, and ask whether Julie Boonstra has any idea of what “unaffordable” means with respect to medical care for leukemia.
When she cut the first of her two ads for AFP in mid-February, Boonstra apparently was genuinely unaware of the full terms of her new Blue Cross plan and of the out-of-pocket-costs limitations legislated in the ACA. And part of the reason why was the failure of healthcare.com to work in October and November and, apparently at least for Michigan’s exchanges, during early December–coupled with Michigan’s decision to not provide its exchange system through a webstie and run and operated by the state.
But Boonstra has known the key facts now since a few days after that ad began running on February 20, and also remained silent until a week ago about the further fact that the specific plan she chose will save her $1,200 this year in addition to the low-enough-that-she-maxed-it-out-each-month monthly out-of-pocket costs of her old plan.
The Koch brothers and the rest of the Americans for Prosperity crowd are sociopaths; their intense, diabolical campaign of disinformation is sick. It’s also un-American, in what is, or should be, the most basic sense. But at what point does someone like Boonstra or Emilie Lamb, people who have chronic life-threatening illnesses requiring regular extremely expensive healthcare, cross a line into sociopathology when they persist in assisting a campaign to provide that care to others, using bald misrepresentations of fact about their own insurance situations?
Lamb knew at the outset that that was what she was doing. Boonstra apparently did not, but has known since before she cut the second of her AFP ads.
I hope Peters and other Dems use people like Terry Coppage and his wife to make the point that Boonstra, Lamb and the rest of that crowd are trying to make others who have severe, ongoing, expensive healthcare needs–and others who will be in that situation–their own personal victims.
You wanna see an effective ad about the ACA? I’ve just proposed one. Will something like it actually air? Nah, probably not. A veritable hallmark of current Dem pols and their ridiculously expensive consultants is bald cowardice. And stupifying asininity.
It apparently hasn’t occurred to them, and probably won’t, that the way to nullify the unpopularity of Obamacare is to make Obamacare popular! And that the way to do that is with ads that illustrate what Obamacare IS and DOES, and what Obamacare is NOT and what it DOES NOT DO.
I thought I’d died and gone to heaven this morning when I read an actual political pundit, albeit a guest one, Paul Waldman, in a mainstream publication–The Washington Post!–actually suggest this. Actually, I did almost die–from the shock.
Here’s a suggestion to these candidates: Why are you not using people like Terry Coppage and his wife to illustrate that only Americans, among citizens of the entire world’s developed economies, face financial ruin because they or a member of their nuclear family needs extensive medical care. Only Americans.
Only Americans.
Okay, look, folks. We’re in the oddest of situations, in that our Democratic president is perpetually AWOL, on this and a slew of other progressive policy issues. It’s downright creepy that he doesn’t refute the falsehoods about the ACA , doesn’t apprise people of its significant benefits, and doesn’t remind people that, y’know, like, Julie Boonstra’s beloved now-canceled Blue Cross plan almost certainly had increased premiums and other costs, year after year, and that this year would have been no exception.
But why in heaven’s name is Obama’s weird lethargy or stupidity contagious among Democratic politicians?
I think the biggest problem is their reliance upon a set of consultants who haven’t noticed that Dem cowardice always spells defeat. Always.
Always.
Hey, Rep. Peters: Fire your consultants and just read Angry Bear! We’re cheaper.