Did Obama's Mother Really Have to Fight With Insurance Companies to Get Treatment?

That's what he told us many times during the 2008 campaign and the 2009 Obamacare campaign.  But the answer is "no".  From Beltway Confidential:

Many authors of newly-published books are eager to discuss their work, especially if the book has made news.  But Janny Scott, author of A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, doesn't want to talk about what has become the most newsworthy part of her generally well-received new biography.


Scott, a former New York Times reporter, deserves praise for discovering that President Obama repeatedly misled voters during the 2008 campaign, and also during the 2009 health care debate, when he said that his mother, Ann Dunham, spent her final days fighting an insurance company that sought to deny payment for cancer treatment. Scott, who had access to many of Dunham's personal papers, discovered that Dunham, an anthropologist who spent most of her career in Indonesia, had health coverage that paid for her treatment for uterine and ovarian cancer, from which she died in 1995.  "Ann's compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment," Scott wrote.  "Once she was back in Hawaii, 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."

Dunham did have a dispute with another insurance company, CIGNA, over a disability policy, which she want to pay her living expenses and other costs.  It was that coverage that was denied on the grounds of a pre-existing condition.  "Though [Obama] often suggested that she was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition," Scott wrote, "it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage."  The facts of the matter, it turns out, are quite different from what the president said.

What's even more interesting as you read the rest of the piece is the author doesn't seem to want to talk to anyone about her book. That's pretty unusual behavior for a published author, and it makes me wonder how much she's been paid to keep quiet.