RUSH: From Ft. Lauderdale: ‘A woman battling a cancer battle was dealt a surprise blow by Uncle Sam this month. Diana Smith has gone through six months of radiation and chemotherapy — one week out of every month. She is in remission and had a donor for a transplant; being in remission is 
prerequisite for the transplant. But her hopes of receiving the transplant were dashed in March, when she says, the Social Security Administration contacted her — without her soliciting it — and told her that her three-year-old son was entitled to receive Social Security disability payments. Even though she didn’t ask for it, she signed the form and received her son’s first check check [sic]. In April, Medicaid canceled her universal health care policy because her income level had risen with her son’s payments — making her ineligible for the insurance program.’
My friends, the largest insurance company in the United States, the United States government and its CEO Obama, tricked a woman! They tricked a woman out of getting off her medical coverage. Since when does the Social Security Administration start soliciting? We know the food stamp crowd does. But now the Social Security Administration called her up. ‘Hey, you want to get your kid on disability payments?’ And of course she said, ‘Yeah,’ and that income vaulted her above her eligibility level. ‘The problem is Jackson Memorial Hospital cannot provide the procedure because the risk is too high. The universal policy from Medicaid helps shield the hospital from liability in this kind of case. Without it, they are subject to liability issues. Even though Smith offered to cancel her son’s disability benefits, she was told it’s too late.
”She’s gone through six months worth of radiation and chemo, her body can’t take anymore. If they don’t allow her to have this transplant coming up right now next week, they’re in effect signing her death warrant,’ said her friend Tom Noonan.’ Can anybody say death panel? Now, here’s your all-caring, all-loving federal government — the Obama regime — claiming that this only happens in the private sector. Only the evil, private sector insurance companies do this to people. Now the regime tricks an unsuspecting citizen into accepting disability payments for her son, which launches her income above the eligibility level, and universal care has been dropped. She can’t do any more radiation, chemo, because it would wipe her out. The only thing now is a transplant. She is in remission. That has been denied. So they tricked her.
Your coverage will not change!
You wanna to keep your doctor? You can keep your doctor!
Your coverage won’t change!
The only thing missing from this story is an official letter from the White House saying, ‘Just take a pain pill.’ That’s all that’s missing. This is an important story. They have a picture of this woman here. She’s very young with her little son next to her, and she’s bald because of the radiation treatments. I’m just struck by this, because this is the exact kind of thing that the regime used to accuse the private sector of doing to try to convince as many people as possible to support the government running everybody’s health care. Yeah. Let’s just see if this woman’s son becomes an Obama sob story, because he’s still out there selling this, folks. He’s still out there selling his health care plan. Will he grab this woman’s son, Diana Smith’s son, and will he parade him all over the country on these sales pitches at various town meetings and say, ‘Look what the federal government did to this man, this young child’?
No, he won’t. Of course Obama will not exploit this family for his own personal political gain. This is a woman, according to a friend, who’s been sentenced to death by the regime. Now, I imagine with all the attention this story is going to get that there will be somebody come in as white knight, save the day, and suggest, ‘Oh, it was a mistake that happened. I’m sorry. We’re going to make this right.’ We’ll see now since this story has received a lot of attention. Especially now. We’ll just see if an exception isn’t made here, or some step is taken. If that happens, don’t forget what caused it, and that is existing federal rules. You don’t qualify for all this help if your income level is at a certain level and I bet it’s not that high. This woman cannot possibly have a whole lot of money. So despite all the promises and all the talk about how everybody’s going to get the coverage they want…
We tried to warn you before the vote that there are more denials of claims, more declines of insurance from Medicare and Medicaid expressed as a percentage than anywhere in the private sector. The regime’s stories with all these kids, these sob stories, they’re largely made up. Now, Big Insurance, if this happened? If he news had gotten out that a big insurance company did this, they’d admit they made a mistake. They’d do something because the PR would require them to. But the government does not have to admit that it made a mistake because it has no competitors. Medicaid and Medicare are it for the poor and to the elderly. So it will be up to the magnanimity of the regime and whatever PR value they think might accrue to them if they reverse course on this. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens, not to be compassionate to the mother and not to be compassionate to the child, but to limit the PR hit.
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RUSH: This story involving the woman out of Ft. Lauderdale is far more dramatic and far more painful than any of the sob stories Obama misrepresented or even made up in his town hall tour to sell health care.
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RUSH: Bob in Sacramento from KFBK, our blowtorch affiliate out there. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: For 20 years I’ve been working in the Medi-Cal, Medicare veterans benefit field, and the story you were telling earlier is not an isolated event. That happens, has happened hundreds of times in my career.
RUSH: You mean the government will call, solicit Social Security in this case, Social Security supplemental payment, putting the patient above the eligibility line and losing her coverage from the government, Medicaid?
CALLER: Because they’re different programs, people have no idea that one impacts the other. So they think that they’re gonna go out and in this case she thinks she’s helping her son, and in helping her son she finds out that she loses Medi-Cal. We have people denied organ transplants. We’ve had people die while waiting for medical care.
RUSH: From the government?
CALLER: Right now the VA takes a year to get people medical care in some cases. This is not new. I’ve been telling people for years that in effect — I know it’s not technically correct — but the death panels already exist because we have government bureaucrats somewhere sitting in an office who are making health care decisions and life-and-death decisions for people, and they don’t know anything about what’s going on.
RUSH: Well, do you think it’s possible this woman was genuinely tricked, that Social Security called her up to get her to take the supplemental benefits precisely to disqualify her from Medicaid payment for her organ transplant?
CALLER: I can’t say that for a certainty because I wasn’t there, but let me tell you, I’ve seen nefarious activities happen all the time in which workers don’t tell people, ‘If you do this it will impact that.’ We see that all the time.
We see it with IRAs, we see it with pension plans, we see it with homes, we see it with all kinds of stuff where people are given incorrect or very misleading information.
RUSH: Bob, thanks very much. That’s excellent. The largest insurance company in the country, owned and operated by the regime, and this apparently is very common, which a lot of people tried to inform everybody of, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. The Democrats in the House simply didn’t care about any of these kinds of details.