Politics

Obama senior adviser blames insurance company for cancerous woman’s plight

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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One of President Barack Obama’s senior advisers criticized a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday from a cancer patient losing her health coverage because of Obamacare, and endorsed the idea that the woman’s insurance company is really to blame.

Daniel Pfeiffer, assistant to the president and senior adviser to the president for strategy and communications, tweeted out the message “The Real Reason That The Cancer Patient Writing In Today’s Wall Street Journal Lost Her Health Insurance,” along with a link to a ThinkProgress article that blames the woman’s insurance company United Healthcare for dropping her.

United Healthcare is dropping the woman due to Obamacare.

“Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers. My grievance is not political,” California resident Edie Littlefield Sundby wrote in a Sunday night op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that quickly went viral on the Internet.

“For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2 percent after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31,” Sundby wrote.

“My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40 percent to 50 percent more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits,” Sundby wrote.

“Countless hours searching for non-exchange plans have uncovered nothing that compares well with my existing coverage. But the greatest source of frustration is Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchange and, by some reports, one of the best such exchanges in the country. After four weeks of researching plans on the website, talking directly to government exchange counselors, insurance companies and medical providers, my insurance broker and I are as confused as ever. Time is running out and we still don’t have a clue how to best proceed,” Sundby wrote.

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Patrick Howley