Phony Soldiers For Socialized Medicine

Via FreeRepublic and Rush, it turns out the 'poster child' for SCHIP expansion, who gave the Democrat ratio address on Saturday, is actually in a a well-off double-income family that sends their kids to private school and owns an expensive house and commercial property, begging the question of why they need taxpayers to pick up the tab for them on health care:

RUSH:This 12-year-old kid that the Democrats used in the Saturday radio address to whine and moan and cry to President Bush about the S-CHIP children's health program, it turns out that the family of this kid sends its kids to "one of Baltimore's expensive private schools." This family owns a house in a neighborhood of homes valued in the $400,000 to $500,000 range. This family bought commercial property in 1999 for $160,000.

This is Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old, and Frost's father is self-employed. He owns the building in which he works. His father makes about $45,000 a year while his mother is employed is at an unspecified salary by a medical publishing house that doesn't provide health insurance coverage. Bottom line. This is from Mark Tapscott, who is an editorial page editor at the Washington Examiner, has been tracking all this on the blogs. "Two points. First, people make choices and it's clear the Frosts have made choice to invest in property and a business, but not in private health insurance. The Maryland-administered version of the federal SCHIP program, by the way, does not impose an asset test on applicants." It's one of the states where you have no asset test, so anybody can be part of the program! What the Democrats did: "President Bush used his regular Saturday radio address yesterday to explain and defend his veto of the massive expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) approved last week by Congress. ... An hour later on national radio, the Democrats' response to Bush was delivered by Baltimore private middle school student Graeme Frost, who along with his sister was seriously injured in an auto accident three years ago.

Tuition for the private school they attend is a whopping $19,530. They can afford private school, but they need taxpayers to foot the bill for their health insurance? It doesn't make any sense. This follows a long tradition of Democrats finding 'poster child' cases to beat up Republicans, hard-luck cases that, upon further inspection, are not so hard-up after all.

Freeper DocRock has more:

During John Kerry's nomination acceptance speech during the 2004 DNC, he trotted out his health insurance "poster child", Mary Ann Knowles. Kerry stated that she had to "keep working day after day right through her chemotherapy, no matter how sick she felt, because she was terrified of losing her family's health insurance". In reality, she had excellent coverage with 26 weeks of paid disability leave, but she chose to work through most of her treatment because her husband was unemployed.

Al Gore tried this same tactic in 2000 with Winifred Skinner: Al Gore said, "It brings tears to your eyes. Here's this adorable, elderly woman out in Iowa who's so sick and so poor, that in order to pay for medicines she needs to stay alive, she has to scavenge in a local dump yard for cast-off tin cans." "She gets a small pension," he said. "But in order to pay for her prescription drug benefits she has to go out seven days a week, several hours a day, picking up cans."

It turns out, as the statement was rectified, Mrs. Skinner goes out zero days a week, for zero hours a day, and that she was only speaking "in the name of" people she assumes must do this.

In 1994, Hillary Clinton used Kathy Bush when citing her case as an example of the high cost of medical care. Later, investigators found her mother guilty of intentionally making her daughter sick and forcing her to undergo more than 40 needless surgeries, in what prosecutors called a case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.