Geez; you take on the President on the radio, and you have your family’s personal finances dissected in public.
ThinkProgress offers a rebuttal to some of the noises made by anti-SCHIP bloggers:
1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
3) They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
4) Last year, the Frost’s made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.
OK, fair enough. The private school tuition isn’t relevant. Some quibbling could be made about the difference between income and net worth, but even Michelle Malkin notes:
I just returned from a visit to Frost’s commercial property near Patterson Park in Baltimore. It’s a modest place. Talked to one of the tenants, Mike Reilly, who is a talented welder. He said he had known the Frosts for 10 years. Business is good, he told me, though he characterized Frost as “struggling.”[...]
I also passed by the Frosts’ rowhouse. There was an “01 - 20 -09” bumper sticker plastered on the door and a newer model GMC Suburban parked directly in front of the house. I’ve seen guesstimates of the house’s worth in the $400,000-plus range. Those are high.
Reading through other comments, it looks like the family might be getting help from the grandparents. which would also explain why the New York Times archives are presumably being pummeled with requests for an old wedding announcement for the family.
Even one of the insurance blogs I follow has been put into the spotlight. Around the time of the speech, the Prof at InsureBlog noted:
The Frost family has a combined annual income of about $45,000, said Bonnie Frost. She and her husband have priced private health insurance, but they say it would cost them more per month than their mortgage - about $1,200 a month. Neither parent has health insurance through work.
$1200 per month for a family of 6 in Baltimore. Really? What are they smoking?
A check of a quote engine for zip code 21250 (Baltimore) finds a plan for $641 with a $0 deductible and $20 doc copays.
Adding a deductible of $750 (does not apply to doc visits) drops the premium to $452. That’s almost a third of the price quoted in the article.
You know, there’s an insurance company down the road from Baltimore that has a Gecko that could help with the comparison-shopping here.
Despite all this hub-bub, I’m going to stand by a point I made in my previous post:
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?
In addition—egads, people are nuts. Folks on both sides of the issue seem to be giving the Frost family a hard time over this. Perhaps the Dems could have chosen a better spokeschild on SCHIP….but folks, focusing your attention on a family that has had a horrible tragedy is somewhat distracting from subjects that are of a bit more national importance—whether to re-expand SCHIP, come up with an alternative, or do nothing…and the extent to which the government should be protecting ourselves from decisions we make.
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?
