Posted on 10/11/2007 6:04:41 AM PDT by kristinn
Since then, Frost and his family have been introduced first-hand to something else that most kids his age haven't: the reality of how brutal partisan politics can be in the Internet age. It started over the weekend, when a blogger calling himself Icwhatudo put up a post on the conservative website Freerepublic.com noting what he had found by scavenging around the internet: that Graeme attends a private school, lives in a remodeled house near one that had sold for $485,000 in March and is the child of parents whose wedding was announced in the New York Times. The post also noted that his father purchased a $160,000 commercial space in 1999.
SNIP
And while they are still uninsured, they claim it is most certainly not by choice. Bonnie Frost says the last time she priced health coverage, she learned it would cost them $1,200 a month.
In short, just as the radio spot claimed, the Frosts are precisely the kind of people that the SCHIP program was intended to help.
SNIP
While the family continues to support the vetoed bill that would expand the program to 4 million more children, they are hoping to remove themselves from the middle of the storm. After giving a few interviews, Halsey and Bonnie Frost now say they don't want to say anything more, though network camera crews have planted themselves in front of their house.
SNIP
Politics has never been a gentle game. As far back as 1895, satirist Finley Peter Dunne's fictional saloonkeeper Martin Dooley observed that women, children and prohibitionists would do well to stay out of it, because "politics ain't beanbag." But surely, even Mr. Dooley could never have imagined a day would come when a mere seventh grader could be swift-boated.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
If you can imagine a woman who has suffered from severe constipation for thirty years you have a picture of Karen Tumulty.
Now folks just remember...The left like to deal only in the emotions to make their point so the FACTS have nothing to do with it..We are just mean nasty Swift Boaters....”
WE need T-Shirts!!!!!!
Let me know if anyone out there is making some up!!!
Obviously Bonnie doesn’t do her homework because “bloggers” found family plans as low as $300 a month. This family put their son in the spotlight for a cause they already had the benefits of so they are now fair game.
Exactly. It's such a liberal chickenshit manuever.
If, by "swiftboating", she means exposing the truth behind a publicly-posturing Democrat, I guess that just goes to show you - A person who goes public becomes a "public person", and subject to public scrutiny.
Besides, nobody went after the kid, they just pointed out that his parents are far from "needy", and probably shouldn't be on the dole.
Here’s a funny thing. Before the accident, they could have afforded health insurance. But they decided not to spend the money.
When they needed health coverage, the existing SCHIP program covered them. This is a Republican program that gave them what they needed, after they failed to protect their own family.
They don’t need the expansion of the program, so they are a meaningless distraction to the fight, but one the Democrats chose for just this purpose.
But here’s the funny thing. Under any democratic proposal for universal health care, this family would have been forced to buy health insurance. Because universal health care can’t work if you don’t force healthy people to pay for it.
This family had a CHOICE of whether to buy insurance. If they had made the right choice, they’d still have insurance today. But in fact, it may have well been the “wrong” choice since I paid for their health insurance after they failed to do so.
Why would anybody buy health insurance if someone else is willing to pay for their treatment?
I would say that some of the pundits have gone way overboard. The issue was NEVER whether this family was cheating the system — it was only whether this family was really an example of why the program needed to be expanded.
In fact, this family was covered under the program before, and would be covered under Bush’s proposal to increase funding for the program. We don’t need to fight over whether they should have been refused, or whether they have too much money, because that’s not the point.
The point is that the Democrats have cut off this family from the program. They are holding millions of families like this HOSTAGE, to blackmail the president into approving an expansion which is NOT to help these needy families but instead to pay off another few million voters to re-elect democrats.
And the Democrats want to do this by taxing poor cigarette smokers, some for more than $400 extra a year.
We shouldn’t have gone from exposing the truth to attacking the messenger (not us here on FR, but some have done so). Although I don’t think ANYBODY has attacked the kid, some have attacked the family, not on facts but just attacked them.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing out that the family is a solid middle-class family who made choices but still got SCHIP coverage under the old program. There’s no problem in highlighting that this family HAD the choice to buy medical insurance, and chose not to. But while other attacks may be “fun”, they detract from the message.
We need to get back to winning arguments by our ideas, not our ability to call people names.
This whole firestorm could have been prevented had the Democrats done their research. Now the media is camped out on their front yard and their finances are under scrutiny by the blogosphere. While the parents share blame by pimping their kids, the Democrats who selected them are the political “professionals”. More than likely, dad got stars in his eyes at the idea of his kid being a national spokesperson for this, never thinking of the consequences. The Democrats should have known better.
Insurance companies shouldn’t HAVE to cover anyone (nor should any private enterprise be restricted on who it will or will not serve) , let the market decide.
Actually, his early posts were devoid of speculation, and he labelled his assumptions clearly. He did a great job of simply stating facts, and nobody has had to correct a single fact he posted.
There WERE people who then made assumptions based on those facts, but it wasn’t his fault they did so.
Must hurt the MSM when do-it-yourselfers do a better job than the overpaid professionals.
(Mr. Oreily are you taking notes or are have you assigned that to your staffers too?)
[Editor's note to Frosts: I use my real name on this forum, and stand by everything I type]
You'all are a bunch of liberal/socialist/democRAT hacks.
Oh, btw, a "child" is definitely under the age of 25 you morons.
5.56mm
That’s the price for a quote they got RECENTLY, with the kids pre-existing conditions. Frankly, my GUESS is that they just priced some insurance so they could be more sympathetic when they came out — I don’t see why they would be looking to buy insurance AFTER the accident, when they didn’t before the accident.
After all, now they know they have coverage under SCHIP, so why price insurance for the kids that are already covered, if not just to get an inflated number to use in your argument?
The point is the $1200 number is NOT what it would have costed for insurance before the accident.
On the other hand, the accident was horrendous. The result was devestating. And even with medical insurance through SCHIP, the family DOES have other expenses. They had to replace the car. They had to remodel the house to make it livable for the disabled child, they took out a 2nd mortgage (equity line of credit?) for that.
Taking care of the child takes time and would make it a little harder to get a new job, or to work longer hours.
Yes, the family CHOSE not to buy insurance, but we do encourage that choice — it’s the Democrats who want to take away your choice to not buy insurance. Yes, they did take our tax dollars when their choice turned out to be a bad one, but they DO SEEM to be a family that fits under the parameters of the program.
They were a lousy choice by the Democrats, if we emphasise that they are pretty well off, that the existing SCHIP program worked for them, that no expansion is needed to continue to cover them, and that it’s the DEMOCRATS that have caused them to lose their coverage, in order to hold them HOSTAGE.
Yep, I bet this is the last time the Frosts do a favor for Harry and Nancy! This is a classic case of liberals getting mugged by reality. It appears this couple has avoided dealing with the consequences of their choices their entire lives. They thought this little media event would be no different—they could put their son out there, make their point, and walk away unscathed. Guess again. Welcome to the real world where behavior has consequences, Mr. and Mrs. Frost.
The Frosts needed to be squeaky clean to get through their little shot at 15 minutes of fame. They should have known that. Or the democrat operatives who used them should have told them that. Nobody could have been unaware that as soon as they made their claim, somebody was going to check up on them.
Should be echoed and posted on FR’s main page.
Also, there are trolls who trouble us!
ping
That guy should be very ashamed of himself for this whole episode.
He and his wife are obviously doing fine, and by being smart with their money they could at the very least afford major medical insurance for the whole family.
I never dreamed the State would pay for my children’s insurance, and as a result they didn’t have any for most of their childhood. I told my husband yesterday that I guess it takes a certain kind of person to assume and seek out the State to pay your way- especially people as successful as the Frosts. They may not be “rich”, but they certainly aren’t in need of the rest of us paying for their children’s insurance.
That is the same mentality that allowed a friend I had some years ago to buy her child $100 Nike’s and get her hair and nails done every month while collecting welfare and living in subsidized housing.
Reminds me of the lame commercials for the local check-cashing loan sharks which goes “...get your money, your free money...” lol
Not only is it not free, it’s gonna cost you big time down the road.
You can’t use equity to pay monthly bills, it won’t last long enough. So having equity isn’t going to help them buy health insurance.
And the accident was terrible, the bills were in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Most of us would have trouble covering that on our own after-the-fact.
This is the danger in attacking the family situation instead of attacking the democrats. If the family had a routine tonsilectemy, or better some elective surgery paid for under SCHIPs, you might get to argue that they should have just cut other spending to pay for it.
And it’s perfectly good to note that, before the accident, there were many sources of health coverage that they could afford.
Nobody talks about it, but most states have a really inexpensive child insurance coverage program. Virginia has one, so even if the parents can’t or won’t get coverage, they can insure their kids for less than $100 a month. Kid’s don’t cost much to insure. I bet New York had such a plan.
Or, as others have pointed out, you can get a catastrophic care plan for much less than full coverage. So maybe you have to take out a 2nd mortgage if you have an illness, but after the first thousands you are covered for the big things like this accident.
So I want to argue with the family about their CHOICE, and argue with the family about their insistance that there was NO WAY they could get medical insurance for their children.
But since both the republicans and the white house SUPPORT the SCHIP program, since it was a REPUBLICAN program, since Bush wanted to fund it another $5 billion, I see little point in making a major PUBLIC argument against the program itself at this point.
We would do better to stick to the argument over the EXPANSION, and note that the Frost family was covered just fine under the existing program.
I missed that. Where was that written?
Truth = swift boating. Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead!
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