Graeme Frost and S-CHIP

Karen Tumulty of Time writes about the right-wing smearing of twelve year old Graeme Frost--without, however, inquiring into the role of the office of Senator McConnell (R-Kentucky), Rush Limbaugh, cable-TV personality Michelle Malkin and other slime machine tools of the Republican leadership. And without pointing out that this has been standard Republican Party operating procedure since before Satan mated with Cthulhu and hatched Richard Nixon.

And Time's editors hedge their bets with the headline "The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost": for the 30% Republican dead-enders, "swift-boating" is, as Marcia Stewart says, a good thing.

Here is the story:

The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost - TIME: If you listen closely to the two-minute radio address that 12-year-old Graeme Frost delivered last week for the Democrats, you can hear the lingering effects of the 2004 car crash that put him into a coma for a week and left one of his vocal chords paralyzed. "Most kids my age probably haven't heard of CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program," he says in a voice that sounds weak and stressed. "But I know all about it, because if it weren't for CHIP, I might not be here today."... [A] Category 5 hurricane.... Mark Steyn wrote on National Review Online: "Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and tough choices. But, if this is the face of the 'needy' in America, then no one is not needy."...

[N]ot everything about the Frosts' life pops up on a Google search. While Graeme does attend a private school, he does so on scholarship. Halsey Frost is a self-employed woodworker; he and his wife say they earn between $45,000 and $50,000 a year to provide for their family of six. Their 1936 rowhouse was purchased in 1990 for $55,000. It was vacant and in a run-down neighborhood that has improved since then, in part because of people like themselves who took a chance. It is now assessed at $263,140, though under state law the value of that asset is not taken into account in determining their eligibility for SCHIP. And while they are still uninsured, they claim it is most certainly not by choice. Bonnie Frost says the last time she priced health coverage, she learned it would cost them $1,200 a month. In short, just as the radio spot claimed, the Frosts are precisely the kind of people that the SCHIP program was intended to help....

Halsey did have this to say in an e-mail to me:

My son Graeme has helped put on a human face, that of a young boy, representing the needs of children and families across this nation. We are a hard working family that has stepped forward to support SCHIP. Mudslinging from the fringe has now been directed at the messenger. To be smeared all over the Internet and receive nasty e-mail — my family does not deserve this retribution. It is both shameful and pathetic.

Driven by a most dubious agenda, shortsighted cut-and-paste bloggers, lacking all the facts, have made a feeble attempt at being crack reporters. This is an aberrant attempt to distract the American people from what the real issues are. Hard working American families need affordable health insurance.

I find it morally reprehensible, and the act of a true coward, to publicly (world wide) smear a man and his family and not sign one's own real name to what they have written. I sign my name to what I write.

Dunne's fictional saloonkeeper Martin Dooley observed that women, children and prohibitionists would do well to stay out of it, because "politics ain't beanbag." But surely, even Mr. Dooley could never have imagined a day would come when a mere seventh grader could be swift-boated.

Comments

[wood turtle]

"...Satan mated with Cthulhu and hatched Richard Nixon."

And I think Cthulhu was a fish.

[rcriii]

The sad part is that under other circumstances, the Frosts would be conservative poster children; Hard working, entreprenurial, homeowning, family-oriented, etc.

wood turtle:
It would be mad to attempt a taxonomy of Cthulhu.

[Neal]

This is just one example of the warning of the right wing attack media--"dispute our version of reality and you and your familys life will be torn apart". That is the strategy, even if the attacks are disproved or rebutted, the fear of standing up will remain for the others who would speak up in the future.

[anne]

"Isn't moral hazard something we would like to avoid?"

Yes; certainly, then why learn how to be a moral being and stop the miserable heartless smearing? Why not stop the cowardly heartless immoral smearing? Get it?

[anne]

"Isn't moral hazard something we would like to avoid?"

Then avoid away by avoiding the creepy heartless immoral smearing. We would ever so much like this, we would.

[Neal]

Big John Studd:

You may have a diagram that show the economic and healt ups and downs for your life, but many people aren't as lucky as you.

Be an adult and get past the point of demonizing the individual. The reality is is that health insurance is expensive. The reality is is that the need for health insurance is unpredictable. The other everlast economic reality is that expenses that must be paid on the spot(heat, food, clothing, gas, auto repairs, water heaters, car insurance, roof leaks, etc., etc.) occur freqently and eat away at the available cash.

Breaking it down, the $1200 a month for insurance represents well over 1/3 of the monthly available cash. Where would you cut?

I think the true question is what is so sacrosanct about insurance companies that their welfare must be considered above all others in this country?

[Neal]

You can't get a mortgage without proof of insurance. You can't drop house insurance without the mortgage company being notified. They will then offer you coverage from their supplier at a usually higher rate. You can't get a license to drive a car without proof of insurance. You can't renew registration without proof of insurance. For all practical purposes these insurances are not optional in any sense. You can bet that without these checks in place fewer people would have these insurances.

And check it out, individual health insurance costs significantly more than that available through groups. The $1200 dollar figure for a family of 6 quoted is for high deductible, very minimal insurance coverage before an incident.

It is almost certain that the cost of the policy will rise by a multiple of the present cost after an incident and would quickly become unaffordable with a chronic care situation. Obtaining other coverage becomes impossible.

So, once again, how would you structure your budget before the incident to take $1200 a month out of it for insurance?

What would you do after the incident when insurance costs triple or quintuple?

Is it an different if you go bankrupt and lose your house because of recurring or new health care costs after the initial, covered, incident? Are you then morally superior?

[howard]

Big John, one of the many problems with the moral hazard argument is that it assumes that people really just want to go to the doctor, spend time in the hospital, and in general indulge themselves in a massive orgy of medical spending and only intimate familiarity with pricing will keep such wanton behavior in line.

or, i could note, as generations of health-oriented economists have noted, that when it comes to your health, the pricing mechanism doesn't really work very well.

You, apparently, think it would be a good thing for society if the frosts didn't (and let's assume you're accurate, which you may well not be) use their equity to try and grow and improve their financial position but rather paid it out in monthly insurance payments.

i actually do not think that is what the founders intended when they noted that one purpose of the united states was to promote the general welfare, not to mention to form a more perfect union.

I have high deductible coverage, but i don't know what you regard as "low premium," but it sure doesn't match what i pay for a family of 3.

[Paul J. Reber]

@BJS -- No, "moral hazard" would be engaging in risky, potentially catastrophic, behavior because you have health insurance (e.g., smoking because you knew the health insurance will pick up the tab for your cancer treatment).

Being forced to risk destitution because you can't afford catastrophic coverage is an immoral hazard.

[RW]

As I understand it the Frosts have been denied coverage due to 'pre-existing conditions' so the main point appears to be moot.

And the vile bloviations of the right-wing smear machine barely get my bile going these days: They will be proved wrong or lying, once again, and will express neither contrition nor acknowledgment of error, once again.

It was mildly surprising that Mitch McConnell's staff is directly implicated in instigating the Swift-boating of the Frost boy (e.g., http://tinyurl.com/ypxd46) but only because the only real competence the right-wing has claim to is its fairly consistent ability to evade culpability for its assassinations.

But perhaps even that skill is flagging, at least the attack on the Frosts appears to be backfiring; e.g., http://tinyurl.com/2enlsp

[Kate G.]

Well, I missed "big john's" contribution to this discussion but I've seen plenty like it elsewhere in the bloggosphere. There's nothing much new to say that people haven't said: the Frost's are actually typical of the kind of idealized (white) american the republican party says it want's to help (John Cole and about a hundred other writers), Graeme is just 13 and the attacks on his family are actually really hurtful and problematic (especially the vists to his mother's place of work and the hounding of neighbors and business associates), etc..etc..etc...

But what really gets *my* goat is the confusion many right wing bloggers seem to have between "moral hazard" arguments, libertarianism, and owning up to what they really are arguing for which is either "f*ck you and die already* or *f*ck you and commit infanticide and murder* already depending on whether they are talking to the children or their parents.

In Bush's america where contraception *and* abortion would ideally be illegal there will be *lots* of people who have more children than they can fully support even with two working parents. Government money spent on "teaching abstinence" and "encouraging the adoption of snowflake babies" comes out of a healthcare budget that could be supplying--healthcare! to American citizens. Instead we get nothing but the most childish, ill informed, hostility to people who need help. Given the circumstances of the Frosts--and of a lot of struggling people in this country--the only alternative to the help offered by S-Chip is, first, destitution and then death. That's it. There isn't some miracle "responsibility fairy" that makes everythign come out right in the end. People arguing that the Frost's didn't deserve help, or shouldn't have been given help, are straight up arguing that they should either have aborted their children out of fear that someday they might not have been able to afford catastrophic care for them, or that they might as well stand by and watch them die because they are too expensive to live. Those are the choices for compassionate conservativism.

I am continually astounded that the selfsame people who are willing to pledge any amount of borrowed credit to a war to kill people they don't even know can't conceive of raising taxes to pay to keep their own neighbors and relatives. I am no longer astounded at the dishonesty of the arguments used to obscure what is really going on, however, that is just business as usual.

The longer I live the more Forster's "Only Connect" resonates for me as the central issue for humans. Only connect one part of your life to the next, only connect to your neighbor, only connect to what you are really saying and doing. Only by connecting can we get beyond arguments like those advanced by Malkin et al which boil down to some bizarre kind of backwards ressentiment. People who themselves are one job from losing health care coverage, one paycheck and one medical disaster from ruin, are being encouraged by the right wing to see themselves as *personally injured* and *offended* by any attempts to help people *just like them.* I can't tell if the underlying fear is that people will be forced to realize just how fragile their own circumstances are, or if the fear is that there's no amount of money and political will in the world to solve the problem so why bother trying.

Most of the right wing blog commentary just boils down to one long hysterical scream of rage that someone might get something "undeserved." I find that when you ask people to unpack that, to the extent they can, you find yourself sorting through some insane conservative dirty laundry bag of muddled concepts like this:
bad things only happen to bad people
good people can plan to avoid injury and accident
my current good fortune is permanent
my current bad fortune is contingent on something someone else did
If everyone needed help we wouldn't have enough help to go around
Money paid to industry is efficient, taxes are inefficient
making people suffer is necessary to preventing them from taking advantage of me.

and so on and so forth

Really, no amount of logical discussion of policy prescriptions can begin to intervene in this mess. And that, of course, is why Malkin refused to debate Ezra, because the entire discussion for the anti-SCHIP people is about eternal verities and eternal freudian issues and not about using tax money wisely to help people in need.

Kate G.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/opinion/12krugman.html?hp

October 12, 2007

Sliming Graeme Frost
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Two weeks ago, the Democratic response to President Bush’s weekly radio address was delivered by a 12-year-old, Graeme Frost. Graeme, who along with his sister received severe brain injuries in a 2004 car crash and continues to need physical therapy, is a beneficiary of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Mr. Bush has vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded that program to cover millions of children who would otherwise have been uninsured.

What followed should serve as a teaching moment.

First, some background. The Frosts and their four children are exactly the kind of people S-chip was intended to help: working Americans who can’t afford private health insurance.

The parents have a combined income of about $45,000, and don’t receive health insurance from employers. When they looked into buying insurance on their own before the accident, they found that it would cost $1,200 a month — a prohibitive sum given their income. After the accident, when their children needed expensive care, they couldn’t get insurance at any price.

Fortunately, they received help from Maryland’s S-chip program. The state has relatively restrictive rules for eligibility: children must come from a family with an income under 200 percent of the poverty line. For families with four children that’s $55,220, so the Frosts clearly qualified.

Graeme Frost, then, is exactly the kind of child the program is intended to help. But that didn’t stop the right from mounting an all-out smear campaign against him and his family.

Soon after the radio address, right-wing bloggers began insisting that the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend private schools (they’re on scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999).

You might be tempted to say that bloggers make unfounded accusations all the time. But we’re not talking about some obscure fringe. The charge was led by Michelle Malkin, who according to Technorati has the most-trafficked right-wing blog on the Internet, and in addition to blogging has a nationally syndicated column, writes for National Review and is a frequent guest on Fox News.

The attack on Graeme’s family was also quickly picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who is so important a player in the right-wing universe that he has had multiple exclusive interviews with Vice President Dick Cheney.

And G.O.P. politicians were eager to join in the smear. The New York Times reported that Republicans in Congress “were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance” but had “backed off” as the case fell apart.

In fact, however, Republicans had already made their first move: an e-mail message from the office of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, sent to reporters and obtained by the Web site Think Progress, repeated the smears against the Frosts and asked: “Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?”

And the attempt to spin the media worked, to some extent: despite reporting that has thoroughly debunked the smears, a CNN report yesterday suggested that the Democrats had made “a tactical error in holding up Graeme as their poster child,” and closely echoed the language of the e-mail from Mr. McConnell’s office.

All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate....

[Cactus Wren]

OK, I read that they searched for health insurance before the accident, now I'm wondering why one of them didn't take a job that provided family healthcare, instead of just sluffing it off?

Sometimes you take jobs you don't want, because you have to, and providing healthcare for your children is one of those "have to" situations.

I've never heard of a hospital that didn't provide a health insurance plan, and hospitals ALWAYS have jobs available - maybe not glamourous jobs, but from what I know of the situation, a glamorous job wasn't something either parent cared about.

[Cactus Wren]

oops, I got the name mixed up - Mr. Frost, Mr. Halsey Frost. Sorry.

I hope the kids make it through this, I feel like they've been used - by EVERYONE.