Leftists Smear Stage-4 Cancer Survivor Whose Insurance Plan Was Curb-Stomped Under #ObamaCare

It was inevitable.

Leftists will stop and nothing to destroy grassroots resistance to the ObamaCare monstrosity. Still, even this latest smear is lower than the lowest of the leftist-regressive low.

At Twitchy, "Despicable: WH smears cancer survivor who lost her insurance plan due to Obamacare." Plus, "Dana Perino slams WH with advice to shameful cancer victim-blaming Dan Pfeiffer."

Yep, this goes right to the top. See James Taranto, at WSJ, "How Low Can They Go? The White House Attacks a Cancer Patient":

It's been just over a month since ObamaCare's disastrous launch, and it's just over three years until the scheduled election of Barack Obama's successor. It's going to be a long three years. The exposure of Obama's signature "achievement" as both incompetent and fraudulent (with its economic inviability yet to be realized) is also showing the administration's true face. It is an ugly one, and we can expect to see a lot more of it while Obama remains in office.

This morning the White House went on the attack against a cancer patient who is also a victim of ObamaCare. Edie Littlefield Sundby of San Diego explains in today's Wall Street Journal that she's been managing a case of stage 4 gallbladder cancer, an affliction whose five-year survival rate is just 2%. Having survived the diagnosis by seven years so far, she beat very long odds--and she did so with the help of an excellent insurance plan that covered care at three hospitals, two in California and one in Texas.

In touting ObamaCare, Obama asserted at least two dozen times (in slightly varying language) that if you like your health plan, you can keep it. As Sundby explains, she is a victim of Obama's fraudulent sales pitch:

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.

Covered California is the state ObamaCare exchange, one of those that, unlike the administration-built federal one, has some degree of technical functionality. Thus Sundby was able to log in and check out her options, which--contrary to Obama's "new and improved" sales pitch, that people whose policies are canceled will get better insurance--were unsatisfactory. No plan available to her would cover both her primary-care doctor at the University of California, San Diego, and her oncologist at Stanford. Sundby asks: "What happened to the president's promise, 'You can keep your health plan'? Or to the promise that 'You can keep your doctor'? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician." This morning Dan Pfeiffer the fast-talking flack tweeted out a piece from ThinkProgress.org, a leftist propaganda outfit. Titled "The Real Reason That the Cancer Patient Writing in Today's Wall Street Journal Lost Her Insurance," the piece, by one Igor Volsky, claims that "Sundby shouldn't blame reform." Volsky instead blames United Healthcare, which, he writes, "dropped her coverage because they've struggled to compete in California's individual health care market for years and didn't want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby":

"The company's plans reflect its concern that the first wave of newly insured customers under the law may be the costliest," UHC Chief Executive Officer Stephen Helmsley told investors last October. "UnitedHealth will watch and see how the exchanges evolve and expects the first enrollees will have 'a pent-up appetite' for medical care. We are approaching them with some degree of caution because of that."

Get that? The company packed its bags and dumped its beneficiaries because it wants its competitors to swallow the first wave of sicker enrollees only to re-enter the market later and profit from the healthy people who still haven't signed up for coverage.

Sundby is losing her coverage and her doctors because of a business decision her insurer made within the competitive dynamics of California's health care market.

All this may be true, but it begs the question. The addition of a phrase to that last sentence shows why: Sundby is losing her coverage and her doctors because of a business decision her insurer made within the competitive dynamics of California's health care market under the regulatory structure established by Obama's comprehensive "reform." Obama did not qualify his pitch by stating that if you like your health plan, you can keep it unless your insurer makes a business decision to the contrary within the competitive dynamics of your state's health care market. To the contrary, he represented ObamaCare as protecting consumers from precisely that sort of cruel business decision, and he has not backed away from that fraudulent promise: At a speech last Wednesday, he asserted that the only policies being canceled were "substandard" ones offered by former "bad-apple insurers" whose practices ObamaCare reformed.

There's more at the link.

The lame Volsky piece is pure propaganda. Despicable propaganda at that.

Noel Sheppard offers another takedown at NewsBusters, "Obama Advisor Tweets Far-Left Website's Rebuttal to Cancer Survivor Losing Doctors Due to ObamaCare":

... that a senior White House advisor would disseminate such detritus to rebut the claim of a cancer survivor is deplorable.

Sadly, there is no floor to the depths this administration will sink to defend itself or advance its agenda.

Staggering Democrat douchebaggery.