A misleading account of Obama’s mother and her insurance dispute

Bro. Curtis · Mar 19, 2012

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...rance-dispute/2012/03/18/gIQAdDd4KS_blog.html

.....The disability-insurance dispute certainly may have motivated the president, but he has never explicitly stated that. In any case, the filmmakers must have known they had a problem with this story or else they would have recounted it as Obama had done in the 2008 campaign, using phrases such as “pre-existing conditions,” “health insurance,” and “treatment.”
Instead, they arranged the quotes and images to leave a misleading impression of what really happened......

mandym · Mar 19, 2012

But then earlier this year, journalist Janny Scott cast serious doubt on this version of events in her excellent biography, “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s mother.” Scott reviewed letters from Dunham to the CIGNA insurance company, and revealed the dispute was over disability coverage, not health insurance coverage (see pages 335-339).

Disability coverage will help replace wages lost to an illness. (Dunham received a base pay of $82,500, plus a housing allowance and a car, to work in Indonesia for Development Alternatives Inc. of Bethesda, according to Scott.) But that is different than health insurance coverage denied because of a pre-existing condition, which was a major part of the president’s health care law.
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Figures........

Crabtownboy · Mar 19, 2012

Bro. Curtis said: ↑

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...rance-dispute/2012/03/18/gIQAdDd4KS_blog.html

.....The disability-insurance dispute certainly may have motivated the president, but he has never explicitly stated that. In any case, the filmmakers must have known they had a problem with this story or else they would have recounted it as Obama had done in the 2008 campaign, using phrases such as “pre-existing conditions,” “health insurance,” and “treatment.”
Instead, they arranged the quotes and images to leave a misleading impression of what really happened......
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Janny Scott ... an opinion piece. You do know the difference don't you? :laugh:

Bro. Curtis · Mar 19, 2012

I didn't call it a headline, now, did I ? I didn't say this piece spoke for en entire news network, did I ?

Nice try, C.T. Boy.

Don · Mar 19, 2012

Crabtownboy said: ↑

Janny Scott ... an opinion piece. You do know the difference don't you? :laugh:
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Both the Washington Post and the New York Times agree that the president's story about his mother is rated "barely true" or "mostly false."

The book was published in May. In July, the New York Times reported that the White House finally responded to their repeated requests about the book's findings. (Scott, the book's author, was a reporter with the New York Times who left the paper to finish the book.) The White House chose not to dispute the findings.

"We have not reviewed the letters or other material on which the author bases her account," a White House spokesman, Nicholas Papas, told the Times. "The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago."

Papas also said the story was still relevant. "She first could not get a response from the insurance company, then was refused coverage. This personal history of the president's speaks powerfully to the impact of pre-existing condition limits on insurance protection from health care costs," he told the Times. But as the Times story notes, disability insurance was not at issue during the health care debate.
Normally, we steer clear of fact-checks about politicians' families or claims that are less than timely. But Obama used the anecdote to make a case for a significant change in the law that affected the national health care system. We find Scott's reporting and the New York Times story to be compelling evidence that he got a crucial detail wrong, and the White House did not dispute that. His mother was fighting for insurance payments as she was dying, but for disability insurance, not health insurance, as her son said he remembered. So we rate his statement Barely True.

Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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Janny Scott's book on Obama's mother was not an opinion piece; it was a book that was noticed and commented on by many liberal media outlets, including NPR. The fact of the matter is that the president got his facts wrong--facts he used as justification for changing an entire country's health care system.

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