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Julie Boonstra has become a target not only for Democrat Congressman Gary Peters but even more so his liberal media allies

Leukemia patient defends herself against Democrat Gary Peters, liberal media allies



It's tough being Julie Boonstra these days, and battling leukemia might be the easy part. It's bad enough that she saw her health insurance cancelled because of ObamaCare. But now that she's appeared in an anti-ObamaCare ad sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, she's become a target not only for Democrat Congressman Gary Peters (who wants to be her senator), but even more so his liberal media allies.
Do not. Challenge. The official officials. It will not go well for you. The boss told you Sunday about the threat Peters issued against TV stations who ran the ad. The gist of it is that Boonstra talks in the ad about how her new ObamaCare-compliant insurance makes her out-of-pocket costs unaffordable, and by extension blasts Peters for voting for ObamaCare. A column by Washington Post "fact checker" Glenn Kessler runs the numbers and claims she actually comes out about even. This prompts lawyers for the Peters senate campaign to fire off a letter to TV stations, threatening them with the loss of their broadcast license if they don't somehow back up the assertions in the ad. And that has prompted the liberal media to pounce - not on a congressman for threatening the First Amendment rights of broadcast media outlets, but on the cancer patient who just lost the health insurance she liked. Seriously.

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Here's the Detroit Free Press jumping on Boonstra. Here's Salon piling on. You of course expect this kind of crap from MSNBC. Now here's the problem with all this. Neither the Peters campaign nor any of his media enablers really know Julie Boonstra's situation, and they certainly haven't lived her experience. All they're doing is looking at the description of her new plan online and concluding that it works as simply and cleanly as the insurance web site makes it look. Have you ever bought health insurance and discovered it doesn't work in exactly the way they had led you to believe? I bought a policy from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan that listed a premium online - a premium confirmed by the sales rep on the phone - only to be told after I'd signed up and received my first bill that the premium was actually 50 percent higher than the one listed on line, and that the premium listed on line did not exist and never had. This prompted a series of fruitless discussions, transfers to other people and finally the discovery that the original sales rep would no longer return my calls. Did Glenn Kessler investigate Boonstra's personal experience to that extent? Or did he just look at some numbers online and do the math? Because if that's all he did - and it appears that's all he did - then he has no idea what Julie Boonstra's actual experience is. Remember the days when media outlets used to have "consumer advocate" reporters who would investigate when consumers had a problem with big corporations like, say, insurance companies? They promise you one thing but that's not what they deliver, so you call the local I-Team reporter and he sticks microphones in the faces of the insurance executives demanding answers on your behalf? It doesn't work that way anymore. Now, a consumer is frustrated with her insurance, and the media goes after the consumer because her complaint is making Democrat politicians look bad. They don't do any real investigation at all. They look at some numbers on a web site and accuse her of being a liar. And all this nonsense arose because an opinion columnist who labels himself a "fact checker" wrote an opinion, and a bunch of people mistook his opinion for an actual authoritative ruling on truth, based on nothing more than the way the column is labeled. People need to get a clue: Media "fact checkers" are not arbiters of the truth. They are editorialists. To attack a cancer victim who is struggling with the impact of having her insurance cancelled - to call her a liar based on what a media "fact checker" wrote - is about as scummy as a thing can be. In in the midst of it all, Gary Peters hides behind his media allies' skirts. He's attacking the free speech rights of broadcasters. He's letting his allies attack a cancer patient on his behalf. No one is interested in the way ObamaCare has wreaked havoc on her life. They only care about defending a Democrat politician, and the biggest Democrat boondoggle since . . . maybe ever. Here again is the ad:


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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