Be Careful When You Brag, It Can Come Back To Bite You. A Lesson For Obama

Jessica Sanford, one of @BarackObama’s #obamacare ‘success stories,’ will have no insurance.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  November 18th, 2013 at 09:00 PM  | 

RESIZE:AAA

Oh dear God but the Democrats have not done right by this woman.

OLYMPIA, Nov. 17.—Jessica Sanford, the Federal Way woman who got a shout-out from President Obama last month with her fan letter for the Affordable Care Act, got a rather rude awakening last week. Turns out she doesn’t qualify for a tax credit after all.

At least that’s what the letter said that she got from the state. Now she says her dream of affordable health insurance has gone poof. She can’t afford it. She’ll have to go without. “I’m really terribly embarrassed,” she says. “It has completely turned around on me. I mean, completely.”

The short version is that the vaunted Washington state exchange – you know, the one that had Democratic governor Jay Inslee bragging today about how great it is – first messed up Ms. Sanford’s subsidy calculation. Then the exchange misled her about what would happen if she signed her kid up for the Medicaid expansion (she’d lose the tax credit from having a kid). So then the state exchange told Ms. Sanford that she doesn’t actually qualify for a subsidy at all… which means that she went from a gold plan to a silver plan and now is looking at a bronze plan that is so pathetic that it’ll make more sense for her to eat the tax, instead… and even then she’ll have another surprise when it turns out that she’ll owe about $350, not $95*. Oh, and the state of Washington is possibly enrolling people on Medicaid that they have no business enrolling in the first case. It’s hard to say, given how bad the customer service is.

Yay, Obamacare.

There are some who might be predisposed to be unsympathetic, given that Ms. Sanford is a Democrat who is still publicly supportive of both President Barack Obama and his misbegotten travesty of a health care policy. I know that it’s hard to be sympathetic, sometimes. But this is a thing that is happening to people all over the country, and all the smug little proclamations and excuses by President Barack Obama and Governor Jay Inslee and the rest of the Democratic party leadership are doing nothing to help Jessica Sanford, and people like her, and people like her kid. It is our obligation as good and decent people and as patriotic Americans to figure out a way to stop Obamacare before it hurts more people like Ms. Sanford. It just simply is.

And if that means biting back unkind words that might have been otherwise directed at a victim, well, just save them up for people who deserve it. Like, again, Governor Jay Inslee of Washington state. That man has absolutely no business bragging about the pain he’s causing his constituents right now.