Michelle Obama on Healthcare

I just heard on television Michelle Obama's heart wringing story concerning a previous situation wherein one of her daughters had required aid at an emergency room.


It is said that Michelle Obama is a Harvard trained lawyer. Harvard trained lawyers are innately astute and trained in such manner as to be able to choose situation reports and references to support their position.

In her TV presentation, Michelle likely with intention, tended to confuse healthcare availability with healthcare insurance. In her presentation, she mentioned that without healthcare insurance, the family would have been destitute after payment of the emergency room fees. There are a couple things wrong with this. First, the healthcare would have been provided, with or without insurance. If no insurance was available, the recipient (Michelle) would have been expected to pay the fee. If Michelle had been unable to pay at the time, the necessity of payment would have been postponed or possibly canceled. I have heard of no case where a hospital or clinic operator of an emergency room has forced a client into financial destitution.

Michelle also did not mention that the University of Chicago Medical Center hired her part-time in 2002

to run "programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity, and minority contracting."

In 2005, the hospital raised her salary from $120,000 to $317,000. The increase was made at the same time that Barack Obama had just become a US Senator, after which he immediately requested a $1 million earmark for the medical center. Michelle has now resigned from that position, and the hospital says the position will remain unfilled (unnecessary?). This information is available on the top right hand corner of Page 17 of the New York Post of January 24th, 2009, with a short column entitled "Replacing Michelle" in the National Review.

It is not clear to me just when our daughter required emergency room treatment. It may have been a time before her appointment by the University of Chicago Medical Center, but after her appointment, she certainly would have been able to pay that back bill without healthcare insurance.