Sticking up for Julie Boonstra

Dan Calabrese at the Detroit News lays into the media organs that helped Democrats paint cancer patient Julie Boonstra as a liar for complaining about ObamaCare, recalling an earlier age when the media afflicted the powerful with tough questions, rather than teaming up to take down inconvenient private citizens:

Now, if you contend that government policy has messed up your health insurance and left you the worse for wear, you’d better be able to prove it, or some self-important “fact-checker” will give you Pinocchios, or call a flagrant foul on you, whatever that means.

And that brings us back to Julie Boonstra, who is still the victim of an all-out media assault two weeks after she appeared in a commercial sponsored by Americans for Prosperity complaining that Obamacare took away the insurance she liked and saddled her with a new situation that was unaffordable.

You all know what happened next. Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, who never talked to Boonstra, analyzed various plans offered by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and claimed in his opinion, er, “fact check” column that Boonstra was lying about her own situation. This was followed up by the so-called “Michigan Truth Squad” essentially writing the exact same analysis as Kessler and declaring the ad to be a “flagrant foul.”

Calabrese even scolds the Detroit News a bit, while giving them credit for doing what none of the other “fact checkers” did and actually talking to Boonstra herself.  The case he lays out for her essential honesty is well worth reading in full, but to boil it down to the essentials, he dings the “fact checkers” for doing nothing more than look at a couple of price lists for ObamaCare plans, conveniently ignoring numerous important benefits Boonstra got from her old plan (the one Barack Obama lied to her about being able to keep) and forgetting to inform their readers that the ailing cancer patient has already been forced to cancel some drugs and therapies, because she has yet to learn if they will be covered.

If you haven’t been keeping up on the lefty fever swamps, you might not realize how much of their energy has been invested in a nearly religious conviction that Julie Boonstra is a liar, a pawn of the dreaded Koch Brothers.  It’s not uncommon to hear lefties declare that all of the ObamaCare horror stories must be false because Boonstra’s has supposedly been “debunked.”  They see no need to consider a single other case, or of course to ask any of the follow-up questions about this particular patient that Calabrese asked.

And on top of everything else, these supposedly “caring” and “compassionate” liberals place absolutely no value whatsoever on the uncertainty people like Boonstra have suffered, the effort they’ve been forced to invest in securing some pale imitation of the good benefits they used to enjoy, or the fact that Barack Obama repeatedly lied to them and promised none of this would be necessary.  Obama is the fraud, not Julie Boonstra.