We all remember President Obama's Affordable Care Act Press Conference in the Rose Garden on October 21st where he read a letter from single mom Jessica Sandford. Well, scroll down past the video for the latest update on the ObamaCare success story that wasn't.
Debacle: The woman who got a shoutout from President Obama last month for her fan letter for ObamaCare finds out her exchange quote was a computer mistake and she doesn't qualify for a tax credit after all.
In one of his famous photo-ops in the Rose Garden last Oct. 21, with an array of touted beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act behind him, President Obama read a letter from Jessica Sanford of Federal Way, Wash., to explain why the Affordable Care Act, with all its rollout flaws, was still needed.
The letter told a sad tale of a grateful single mom with a son that had ADHD.
But now, like so many of ObamaCare's false promises and outright lies, the safe and secure future which Sanford thought she had found and which the president boasted of has crumbled into dust — just like that health care Potemkin village called the Affordable Care Act.
As the Washington State Wire reports, the Washington state exchange and enrollment website, like its national cousin, had problems. It had told Sanford originally she and her child would get a whopping tax credit that would reduce her total premium to $169 a month for an ObamaCare "gold" plan.
Then she got letters from the state telling her — just like so many others who have had their plans canceled after being told they could keep them — what she had been promised was not true.
Four days after President Obama made his address, the state health exchange publicly revealed a grievous error — its tax-credit calculations were all wrong.
Washington state had been submitting monthly income information to the federal data hub when it was expecting yearly data. Oops!
So everyone who bought a subsidized health insurance policy through the Washington state exchange prior to Oct. 23 was being quoted too low a rate.
Sanford, 48, doesn't make a lot — a little less than $50,000 a year as a freelance court reporter.
But Washington state reported her income as $4,166, which the feds took as her annual salary. It was that, er, "glitch" that allowed Sanford to qualify for a discount of $452 a month. It was that good news that prompted her to write a thank-you note to the president.
Brokers had been informing the state for three weeks that the calculations were screwy but the state, like the proverbial Department of Motor Vehicles, was slow to respond. When it informed Sanford of the mistake, knocking her tax credit down to $110 a month, she went back to her broker and signed up for a "silver" plan with higher deductibles and co-pays.
Then she got another letter from the state saying it had goofed a second time and she didn't qualify for a tax credit at all. Her income was, in fact, too high.
The website had told her that her income was low enough that she could enroll her son in the state Medicaid program for children of low-income families. That was no longer true, either.
Her 14-year-old son Ryan requires a special prescription medication. Without a tax credit, she had to consider the cheapest "bronze" level plans, but the deductibles are so high that she couldn't afford to pay for her child's prescription medication.
So now Sanford faces the prospect of having no insurance at all. Not only does she not get a tax credit, but she may have to pay an IRS-imposed penalty.
In a statement now full of irony, President Obama said: "Now, that is not untypical for a lot of folks like Jessica who have been struggling without health insurance. That is what the Affordable Care Act is all about."
He's right. And that's precisely the problem.
The first rule of health care should be to do no harm. ObamaCare is a lie agreed upon, holding out the false hope of insuring the uninsured while uninsuring the insured — all at great expense and causing great harm.