Posted on 03/16/2010 11:12:36 AM PDT by Nachum
Natoma Canfield, the cancer-stricken woman who has become a centerpiece of President Obama's push for health care reform, will not lose her home over her medical bills and will probably qualify for financial aid, a top official at the Cleveland medical center treating her told FoxNews.com.
Natoma Canfield, the cancer-stricken woman who has become a centerpiece of President Obama's push for health care reform, will not lose her home over her medical bills and will probably qualify for financial aid, a top official at the Cleveland medical center treating her told FoxNews.com.
Though Canfield's sister Connie Anderson said her sibling is afraid she'll lose her house and Obama warned at an Ohio rally Monday that the patient is "racked with worry" about the cost of tests and treatment, she is already being screened for financial help.
Could she not qualify for Medicaid?
There’s another vote for Obambi
so how much TARP money is left???
Sounds like Bummer made some phone calls and some welfare agencies got on the ball.
Hard to tell for sure, but it sounds like the existing system was working fine for her. She wasn’t going to lose her home, but she was worried about the possibility. Worried for nothing, perhaps. Now we learn that she is not in danger of losing her home — but it’s not clear to me that anything suddenly occurred (i.e. Obama’s spotlight did not result in any sort of good Samaritan rescue). Basically, she was a prop. A misleading prop.
The Democrats love to tell sad stories about people without insurance (who apparently don’t know that the law forbids hospitals to deny them treatment, with or without insurance), but what the Democrats don’t say is how their reform bill would protect them. They operate on the unproven premise that they have the remedy. WHY WON’T THEY TALK ABOUT WHAT’S IN THE BILL? Is it because they know the answers aren’t there, or is it because they don’t know what’s in it at all?
BHO is focusing on cancer to scare people. The tonsillitis and diabetes wasn't scary enough and he showed his ignorance discussing those and also his ignorance re: asthma.
Boy, Oboma picked the wong "victim" this time! What an as$.
The “messiah” has touched one of his own./S
why would she have a mortgage on a house she has lived in for 50 years?
Depending on who you ask, negotiations are ongoing or not ongoing. A position statement given five minutes ago may no longer be valid in this crazy Congress.
Nancy-poo is basically telling the country to trust her and Harry, they’ll “do the right thing” even if they can’t say what the right thing is. This might pass muster if you’re regulating the commerce in snapping turtles, but this is our bodies and minds she’s talking about. Get it wrong and you hurt us from the word go. Sorry, after the bounteous load of BS you’ve heaped on us, we don’t even trust them to stick a tongue depressor in our mouth and look at our throat. They might not remember to use a new one.
This is not my field of expertise...not by a long shot. So maybe I am missing something obvious, but here is a portion of her letter to 0bama, with facts I find incomprehensible:
“Last year (2009) my insurance premium was increased over 25% even though I increased my deductible and out of pocket to the highest limits available. I paid out over $6075.24 in premiums, $2415.26 for medical care, $225 in co-pays and $1500 for prescriptions. I never reached my deductible of $2500 so the insurance company only paid out a total $935.32 to my providers.
I must repeat, in 2009 my insurance company received $6075.24 in premiums and paid out only $935.32!”
Would it not be more economical to have put that $6075.24 into some other account, where it would grow or be available for medical expenses? Would the expenses not have been even less if she’d been completely self-pay? (Every nurse I’ve ever discussed it with, said there’s a huge discount for cash on the barrelhead.)
Most people will see it as Bummer having shaken things loose. The hospital isn’t going to crow about its program for understandable reasons.
load of BS you’ve heaped on us => load of BS they’ve heaped on us
Maybe she took out a Second Mortgage, or maybe she’s in danger of losing her house for non payment of Property Taxes?
Maybe she took out a Second Mortgage, or maybe she’s in danger of losing her house for non payment of Property Taxes?
Hell, that’s not much to pay for one vote.
Please pardon me if this is tangential (I'm taking the above as your comment, not the woman's comment) but if you have no applicable insurance and go in to a doctor's office and have to pay retail, how do you go about getting this "cash" discount when the bookkeeper isn't there and they just send you a bill? I've seen insurance benefit statements and they have tremendous leverage upon providers, sometimes getting them to settle for maybe a third of their retail prices.
Yeah, I suspect a home equity line of credit, being used to help pay the medical bills that her enrolled program doesn’t pay.
We've paid thousands every month (from the first day we started working years ago) for health insurace and only used it for child birth. One of my kids came home with strep throat once, but we have a $200 deductable, so we paid cash for that anyway.
Had we banked our money, we'd be pretty rich right now.
Buy major medical and bank the rest. Most of the time you'll have to pay for other services with cash anyway. We learned that lesson the expensive way.
Where’s the link?
In Desperation, Obama Exploits Cancer Patient Natoma Canfield to Sell Obamacare...and Lies About Her
If Obama and his minions say it, you know it’s a lie.
Did she get her free Obama t-shirt yet?
I know that if you go into a nursing home, they can take your house and other assets - perhaps it is because of that.
She had insurance until she got tired of paying for it and dropped it. Then she expects a handout a couple of months later when she gets sick. I’m sorry she got cancer but she dropped her insurance, not me.
Under Oboma Death Care, they'd do the same thing, only they'd do it long before you got sick.
Nice. If she's at the Cleveland Clinic being treated for cancer she's probably getting just about the best care in the world!
That’s the way insurance works. When you’re well and not running up a lot of medical bills it seems like an expensive waste of money. Once you get sick and it starts paying you realize what it’s worth. I have no sympathy for this woman;s financial plight. She caused it herself.
So she started voting for democrats because she knew they'd steal her neighbors pay check to pay for it.
Gosh. What a sweet lady. (/s)
Yet she's trying to make us look like the bad guys for not paying her bills for her.
How can anyone vote democrat and admit it in public?
"commander zero" says that's no good enough. The a$$ is a shameless liar.
Mm Mm Mm so Bummer did stick his pedal appendage in his os.
Again.
It would, if you could be sure you might never need the coverage. What insurance does is mitigate risk. You premiums are the reflection of the actual cost of claims payment for your type of policy, to your age group, in your location.
In most states (I am in California) health insurance companies are required to pay out a minimum of 70% of all premium collected in claims. The average profit margin for these companies are between 2 and 5%, which is in low. Medicare is less efficient, has much more fraud and waste, and pays your doctors, the hospitals and other providers much less than the actual cost of service.
Guess who has to make up the difference?
If you refinance to pull cash out every 5-10 years you never pay it off.
Exactly why obamacare will not work either.
Risk is expensive. Especially some particular risks. That’s a free market operating, when you pay someone else to take your risk.
Folks,
Republicans can destroy the health care reform bill right now if they will stress this message: By immediately raising taxes, this bill will sink our already struggling economy.
If media-prominent Republicans emphasize that single crystallized point, the political pressure on wavering Democrats in the House to vote no will increase enormously. Factually, the bill legislates massive new taxes on personal incomes and on medical devices & services: all of which go into effect immediately upon the bills passage. RAISING TAXES DURING A RECESSION will obviously hurt the economy. (Which is why Democrats have not dared attempt a tax increase despite controlling both chambers of congress.) So as unpopular as this ugly bill already is, it can be made much more so with simple clarion emphasis that: this bill is instant poison to our ailing economy.
The American people already hate what the bill stands for (the rotten substance of the bill) as well as they hate the corrupt process that has produced it. Now it needs to be branded into the national psyche that passage of the bill will straightaway cause personal financial harm to everyone. The ball game will be over if Republicans will simply apply immense pressure to that one crippling point. (They can use the new CBO numbers coming out on the reconciliation/fix-it bill as a fresh predicate to sound the alarm.)
Imagine variations of the following sound bites issued from someone like John Boehner: “If the Health Care Takeover Bill becomes law, our taxes instantly go up, and it will make one of the worst recessions weve ever experienced much worse. Everyone knows you dont raise taxes during a recession.” Or how about: Theres something else Democrats arent telling the American people about this bill which is that it suddenly raises taxes in the middle of a recession. And you cant do that and expect the economy to recover. Did you feel that? Those were the scales tipping in the House. That was wavering House Democrats quietly sliding into the no category by the handful.
Note that this is not the same as arguing that the added deficits this bill is certain to generate will be unsustainable in the long run. Thats the Generational Theft message which has been lucidly conveyed and has resonated with the American public. Yes, severe concern has been raised about the future. But the argument that the bill will also do serious harm to TODAYS jobs and to TODAYS fragile economy has yet to be forcefully made. And this is the checkmate move that is needed during the endgame this week.
A very good prop. Kooch is changing his vote now?
Everyone having to deal with medical crises are racked with worry. It appears that this woman is no different, and most likely much better off, than many. She still has her house, her medical bills will be paid, she’s being cared for in an excellent facility.
What I find exceedingly strange is that she says she never reached her deductible of 2k. Every single year (4) that I underwent cancer treatment I met my deductible in January.
Furthermore, she’s being treated at the Cleveland Clinic, a place that she’d never make it to under Obamacare.
Good point. Wonder if Obamacare will allow us to call in the world’s top brain surgeon from Duke for needed surgery just when he’s about to go on a Canadian vacation ala Ted Kennedy?
They are covering this here in Cleveland. She was already assigned a financial counselor, the hospital she is being treated at doesn’t place lien’s on homes for bills (they could, but they choose not too), she most likely is eligible for medicaid (but had not sought assistance soon enough).
Basically it sounds to me she didn’t know how to navigate the government bureaucracy to get the help she needed. The hospital is the one that actually provided her with the counseling and advocate she needed. She will need to apply for SS disability in order to get medicaid.
If anything she demonstrates the already existing difficulty in dealing with the government systems.
Good point.
I pay cash on the day of services. Discount 60%. No bill sent to my home. All offices I’ve ever been to are able to take my payment that day. General practitioner, hospital, even the surgery center was able to take my payment that day.
So if you go into a nursing home, you are not suppose to pay your own way?
Are your assets supposed to be saved up for your children?
Some believe that, not saying I do, but I was just pointing out what could have been the case.
Someday soon when some poor soul dies of one of the myriad maladies
mortal humans suffer from...
some people will be saying:
“Where was Obama?”
Some people seem to have already turned Obama into, at the least,
a small g-d.
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