Somehow, despite the recent troubling about-face by one of the human shields Barack Obama used in his Rose Garden standoff against growing opposition to Obamacare, one gets the distinct impression he’s not done with theatrics. If past is prologue, the president will be back, touting other successes of his noxious health care law. It is unlikely, however, that Charlene Hopkins, of Pierce County, Wash., will be one of them.
Hopkins’s daughter, Nicole, has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal that chronicles her mother’s descent from a proud and self-sufficient individual into a hapless and unwilling ward of the state.
The younger Hopkins writes that what makes her mother’s story noteworthy is not that she received a notice from her insurance company telling her that her plan would be discontinued on December 31. Nor is it that the Obamacare-compliant version of that same plan would cost 50% more, making it unaffordable.
Rather, it is what Charlene Hopkins discovered when she explored her choices under the Affordable Care Act at Washington state’s Healthplanfinder exchange. Nicole Hopkins writes:
There was just one option — at the very affordable monthly rate of zero. The exchange had determined that my mother was not eligible to choose to pay for a plan, and so she was slated immediately for Medicaid. She couldn’t believe it was true and held off completing the application.
‘How has it come to this?’ she asked in one of our several talks over the past few weeks about what was happening. When she was a working mother and I was young, she easily carried health insurance for our whole family. ‘How have I fallen this far?’
The daughter tried logging in as her mother, thinking that mom had overlooked a step. But the process ended the same way for her. “Congratulations,” her computer screen read. “We received and reviewed your application and determined [you] will receive the health care coverage listed below: Washington Apple Health.”
“Washington Apple Health,” the daughter writes, “is the mawkish rebranding of Medicaid in Washington state.”
Bad enough to be forced into the ranks of those on the government dole. Worse that the name of the entitlement has been replaced with an off-putting euphemism.
Charlene Hopkins laments:
I just don’t expect anything positive out of getting free health care. I don’t see why other people should have to pay for my care, whether it be through taxes or otherwise.
Maybe the president should make Charlene Hopkins Obamacare’s new poster child. Then he can explain to the rest of America how he and his law are helping her.
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