The mother of the boy at the center of a flap with J.K. Rowling says it’s not President Donald Trump who did the snubbing, but Congress.
“You want to know who snubbed my son? Congress snubbed my kid in D.C. when they failed to pass meaningful legislation. Everyone missed the point of why we were there [the White House] in the first place. They [Congress] didn’t come up with a dynamic plan and they didn’t go out and sell it to the American people. If they have a plan, what is it and where is it?”
Rowling recently accused Trump of ignoring the boy during a “Victims of Obamacare” event Monday. Observers were quick to debunk the claim. Days later, Rowling apologized not to Trump, but the boy’s family.
“I appreciate people trying to stand up for me and my family but even slinging mud at people like [Rowling] doesn’t move the conversation. I like action, I like movement and I like solving problems,” Marjorie Weer tells The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview.
Weer says she was overwhelmed by the amount of media coverage after Rowling tweeted a misleading video that appeared to show Trump snubbing Weer’s son as he tried to get the president’s attention. (The video also proved Rowling wrong.) Rowling later deleted the tweets and apologized following an extended public backlash. But, she asks, why aren’t those same media outlets interested in covering the negative impact Obamacare is having on her son’s life?
“Where was CNN when we were complaining about healthcare?” Weer questions. “That’s why I went with Fox News, they talked to us beforehand. They [other media outlets] want to use my family. They saw a potential catfight between me and J.K. Rowling and I’m not giving them that.”
Last week the president highlighted the complications that families like the Weers have faced under Obamacare during his healthcare speech. (RELATED: One Family Shares Its Obamacare Nightmare: ‘These Are Facts’)
The Weer’s three-year-old son, Monty, suffers from spina bifida. After their local provider in South Carolina was out of network in 2016, they had no other choice but to go to Boston Children’s Hospital for her son’s yearly check up at the spina bifida clinic. Boston Children’s has the number one spina bifida center in the nation.
It was not until Marjorie was picking an insurance plan for 2017 when she fully realized the life-changing hurdles Obamacare placed in her path to getting her son the coverage he needs.
In an off the cuff remark to her insurance agent, she told him that he needed to make sure Boston Children’s was still in network given the state Obamacare was in. Soon after, he notified her know that Boston Children’s was going to start restricting care to just in state patients in order to keep costs down. She was discouraged from filing an appeal and that it nothing would come of it.
Nonetheless, Weer filed an appeal after expending hours of her time getting documents from the doctor, faxing, emailing, and being put on hold by Marketplace representatives. After six months of negotiation, Blue Cross let the Weers go up to Boston.
Because of her extensive experience in negotiating with Blue Cross, Weer has little sympathy for Congress when she hears that they are unable to pass legislation that repeals and replaces Obamacare in its entirety. “In my case, a ‘no’ can equal death. If you hit a wall, who the heck cares? It’s just a wall, you can work through the impossible, that’s the world I live in.”
Weer states that the “we can’t” attitude that is pervasive in Congress does not work in her world. The alternative to inaction is death, she says. She advises Congress to get creative and to change their strategy if they want to accomplish repealing and replacing Obamacare.
She did not believe that the ‘skinny repeal’ was an appropriate measure to fix Obamacare. Weer sent Congress to pass a “Jabba the Hutt sized” repeal and replace. The problem, Weer contends, is that there particular groups of people in D.C. who would rather see the American people get hurt by Obamacare than work with President Trump.
Instead of idly waiting on Congress to come up with a solution, Weer urges the American people to start taking ownership in this discussion. She believes that there are far too many smart, ingenious, ‘average Americans’ who have the solution to problems such as Obamacare and they’re talking about it at their dinner table.
“We need to be apart of the discussion because it’s our healthcare, our money and the lives of our family at stake here. That’s why I was in Washington. In the middle of changing diapers I’m trying to come up with ideas that might work too.”
