Catherine Blackwood is counted as a success in the statistics touted by the Obama administration as it continues to peddle Obamacare. She has procured new Obamacare-compliant health insurance. Struggling with carcinoid cancer since 2005, Mrs. Blackwood treats her health insurance as a matter of life and death.
But Mrs. Blackwood is in truth a walking illustration of the destruction wrought by Obamacare. Her son Stephen Blackwood recently recounted in a devastating Wall Street Journal column:
In November, along with millions of other Americans, she lost her health insurance. She’d had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan for nearly 20 years. It was expensive, but given that it covered her very expensive treatment, it was a terrific plan. It gave her access to any specialist or surgeon, and to the Sandostatin and other medications that were keeping her alive.
And then, because our lawmakers and president thought they could do better, she had nothing. Her old plan, now considered illegal under the new health law, had been canceled.
Because the exchange website in her state (Virginia) was not working, she went directly to insurers’ websites and telephoned them, one by one, over dozens of hours. As a medical-office manager, she had decades of experience navigating the enormous problems of even our pre-ObamaCare system. But nothing could have prepared her for the bureaucratic morass she now had to traverse….
Go to Mr. Blackwood’s column for the rest of the unhappy story.
At the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik found villains lurking everywhere in the story, everywhere but in Obamacare itself. I took a look at Hiltzik’s commentary in “Hiltzik’s greatest hitz” (don’t spellcheck me, bro). I found Hiltzik to be one very twisted guy. Yesterday Mr. Blackwood wrote:
I read with pleasure Scott Johnson’s recent piece, “Hiltzik’s Greatest Hitz,” which rebuts very effectively Hiltzik’s hasty attempt at debunking my account in last Monday’s WSJ of my mother’s difficulties under the ACA. Johnson is quite right to point to the question of why, exactly, my mother lost her insurance in the first place. We intend to make the letter of cancellation public, just as a matter of record: it outlines specifically what provisions of the law required the cancellation of her old plan.
Please pass along my gratitude to Mr Johnson for his excellent piece of work.
I’ve asked Mr. Blackwood for a copy of the letter to post on Power Line. Mr. Blackwood also plained about the difficulty of finding my post and suggested that we add several tags to it. I’ve asked Mr. Blackwood for a copy of the Blue Cross cancellation letter to post on Power Line. I haven’t got it, but thought readers might be interested in Mr. Blackwood’s comment on Hiltzik’s hitz.
NOTE: More on the Blackwood family and their struggle on behalf of Mrs. Blackwood is posted at Blackwood Caring.
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