Much of America has come to terms with President Obama being not the most truthful guy at times. He campaigned on ending US wars and has only started new ones. He vowed to close Gitmo yet the infamous prison is still in operation.
But will you get a load of this one? One author is saying that the president lied — get this — about his mother. The gull!
In a new biography of President Obama’s mother, former New York Times reporter Janny Scott writes that Barack was fibbing about a make-believe ordeal his mom went through while fighting cancer.
Back on the campaign trail, Obama often alluded to the problems with American health care. The then-Senator would regularly make references to his mom’s own struggles with insurance companies and would speak out about her dying days marred by health care woes.
“I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” said Obama in one September 2007 speech.
“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” he said another time months later.
In Scott’s new book, however, she reports that Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was actually insured the whole time.
Scott says she obtained correspondence between Dunham and others that confirms that she was under health care coverage throughout her bout with ovarian cancer.
In one message, Dunham writes her then-boss about whether or not she should leave the country for surgery, to which her employer at Development Alternatives responded, “You’ve got health insurance, that’s taken care of.”
Scott adds that during her time with Development Alternatives in Jakarta, she received health insurance benefits which indeed covered the costs of most of her medical treatment. When Dunham eventually returned to her home in Hawaii, Scott says that “the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”
“Though he often suggested that she was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition,” Scott writes, “it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage.”
Dunham died in 2005 while being treated for her condition and the president often recalled her days at death’s door while on the campaign trail.
Unless Obama made that one up too.