Thursday night, Vice President Joe Biden gave a rousing speech in Charlotte, North Caroline at the Democratic Party's national convention -- too bad it was so short on facts.
Already Kat's offered "Oh, shut up, Joe" and Marcia's offered "Joe Biden lied" dealing with factual problems. In addition, Glenn Kessler (Washington Post) highlighted a very egregious lie: by Biden, "Barack, as a young man, they had to sit at the end of his mother's hospital bed, and watch her fight with their insurance company at the very same time that she was fighting for her life."
Kessler notes:
This is a carefully worded statement that suggests President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was fighting for health coverage while she was dying. This is a story that Obama frequently told on the campaign trail, but which was later called into question by Dunham’s biographer. Note that Biden does not specify that Dunham was fighting “health insurance” companies.
During the 2008 campaign, Obama frequently suggested his mother had to fight with her health-insurance company for treatment of her cancer because it considered her disease to be a pre-existing condition.
In one of the presidential debates with GOP rival John McCain, Obama said: “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.”
But then earlier this year, journalist Janny Scott cast serious doubt on this version of events in her 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.) 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.
Biden’s remarks were echoed in the film that aired before Obama spoke. The clips were drawn from a film originally narrated by Tom Hanks -- this one was by George Clooney -- and we had previously given Three Pinocchios to the film for the manipulative way this story is retold.
Oh, Joe.
