About The 12 Year Old Who Responded On Health Care to the President’s Weekly Radio Address

Remember how on many occasions in the past 6 years, the Administration would spotlight a “normal person” to serve as a personification of a point the Administration was seeking to make…but that spotlighted individual would turn out to be not quite what was advertised?

It seems that the Dems may have drawn a bit too much from the same playbook in their choice of a 12 year-old child to personify the problem of lack of health insurance in families with children.

First, we have a Baltimore Sun article on the Frosts:

Graeme and his 9-year-old sister, Gemma, were passengers in the family SUV in December 2004 when it hit a patch of black ice and slammed into a tree. Both were taken to a hospital with severe brain trauma. Graeme was in a coma for a week and still requires physical therapy.

Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work.

Having priced private insurance that would cost more than their mortgage - about $1,200 a month - they continue to rely on the government program. In Maryland, families that earn less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level - about $60,000 for a family of four - are eligible.

Sounds tragic, right? A lower income family where the kids have suffered horrible, and expensive-to-treat, injuries…and, well an American public that likes to help disadvantaged children out.

“icwhatudo” at the Free Republic fills in a couple of details that paint a slightly different picture:

“I was in a coma for a week and couldn’t eat or stand up or even talk. My sister was even worse,” Graeme wrote. “My parents work really hard and always make sure my sister and I have everything we need, but we can’t afford private health insurance.”

His sister Gemma, also severely injured in the accident, attended the same school prior to the accident meaning the family was able to come up with nearly $40,000 per year for tuition for these 2 grade schoolers.[...]

What the article does not mention is that Halsey Frost has owned his own company “Frostworks”,since this marriage announcement in the NY Times in 1992 so he chooses to not give himself insurance. He also employed his wife as “bookkeeper and operations management” prior to her recent 2007 hire at the “medical publishing firm”. As her employer, he apparently denied her health insurance as well.[...]

One has to wonder that if time and money can be found to remodel a home, send kids to exclusive private schools, purchase commercial property and run your own business… maybe money can be found for other things.

Now, having been through the horror of having a loved one go through, I am the last person to want to belittle the Frost’s experience. Even if you own your own business and are comfortably well off, the massive disruption from the attention required for the injured family member(s), dealing with insurance, the co-pays, deductibles, and stop-loss… it’s far more maddening and stressful than it ought to be.

That aside…doesn’t this seem to be more a story of a family whose priorities were perhaps not properly ordered? From what I’m reading, it sounds like these folks could have afforded health insurance, but opted to place other desires above that need. They gambled wrong, and benefited from a government safety net.

Is this significantly different from situations where a homeowner could have bought flood insurance, didn’t, and seeks a federal handout to rebuild when a flood destroys his/her home?

I don’t have any major objections to the notion that children ought to have access to health care in this country. It’s something that seems obvious from a moral point of view, and an argument can be made that ensuring that goal is met is a means of investing in the nation’s future.

However, government support for such a goal shouldn’t come in the form of subsidizing luxury and irresponsible financial planning, right?