Republicans attack a 12-year-old boy. I wrote about this briefly yesterday, but I think it’s worth expanding upon.
The story, basically, is that 12-year-old Graeme Frost was in a horrific car crash that left him severely injured and in a coma. The crash left his sister with permanent disabilities. The Frosts didn’t have health insurance, and the S-CHIP program kicked in to pay for the kids’ health care. Democrats have been trying to expand the program, and Bush has vetoed the expansion. Graeme was invited to give the response to Bush’s weekly radio address on Sept. 29th, and he discussed his experience and how S-CHIP helped him.
And Republicans went on the attack.
In recent days, Graeme and his family have been attacked by conservative bloggers and other critics of the Democrats’ plan to expand the insurance program, known as S-chip. They scrutinized the family’s income and assets — even alleged the counters in their kitchen to be granite — and declared that the Frosts did not seem needy enough for government benefits.
(…)
The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.
One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.”
Michelle Malkin went as far as to show up in the Frosts’ neighborhood and at their workplace to survey their living situation and talk to their neighbors.
I wonder how she’d react if someone showed up at her home, talked to her neighbors about her, and then posted all the info they could find (including wild speculations about her financial status) on an extremely popular website read by creeps and assholes across the world?
But, whoops, Michelle and her friends were wrong:
As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.
The conservative response? Argue that the family should have sold their property and other assets to pay for health insurance.
The whole thing is beyond ridiculous. Yes, the Frosts do own a piece of commercial property valued at $160,000 — and they use it to generate income. In other words, selling it would make them poorer. And it wouldn’t have provided them a stable income to be used for monthly insurance costs.
But Michelle Malkin, one of the bloggers who have strongly criticized the Frosts, insisted Republicans should hold their ground and not pull punches.
“The bottom line here is that this family has considerable assets,” Ms. Malkin wrote in an e-mail message. “Maryland’s S-chip program does not means-test. The refusal to do assets tests on federal health insurance programs is why federal entitlements are exploding and government keeps expanding. If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.”
So if your kids get sick or are injured and you don’t have insurance, you should have to sell your house and any other assets you have. Then if you’re really poor, maybe the government will help you — but more likely, folks like Malkin will accuse you of making stupid financial decisions and ask why you think you’re entitled to government aid.
Conservatives are also asking why kids are being used as political props. While that’s generally problematic, this issue is about kids. You know, real kids. Not adorable “snowflake babies”* which, if I remember correctly, have been trotted out a few times. It isn’t even peripherally about children. The whole, entire focus is children’s health. So while it may be uncomfortable to have to see the face of an actual 12-year-old to whom you’d like to deny medical care, that’s the reality of the right-wing political position on this one.
It’s particularly interesting how the party of corporate welfare will bend over backwards to prove that the poor are wasteful and entitled, and then turn around and bitch about things like the “death tax” because it takes money from trust-fund babies. I suppose the most deserving of money are chosen by God to be born into it, and the rest of us should just shut up and be happy with what we have. After all, if we get sick we can always just go to the emergency room, right?
*By which I mean the “adopted” embryos, not the actual kid after it’s born.