Jolie Rouge

Busted!

A Freeper took the trouble to investigate the 12-year-old who gave the Democrats' weekly radio address last week, and whose family ostensibly is too poor to pay for medical insurance, and therefore wants to use your money instead. The results are hilarious.

The "Not So Poor" 12 Year Old Who Rebutted Bush on SCHIP Veto
10-07-07

Graeme Frost, who gave the democrat rebuttal to George Bush’s reasons for vetoing the SCHIP Bill, is a middle school student at the exclusive $20,000 per year Park School in Baltimore, MD.

Graeme was in a severe car accident three years ago, and received care paid for by the government program known as SCHIP-(State Children's Health Insurance Program) "I was in a coma for a week and couldn't eat or stand up or even talk. My sister was even worse," Graeme wrote. "My parents work really hard and always make sure my sister and I have everything we need, but we can't afford private health insurance."

His sister Gemma, also severely injured in the accident, attended the same school prior to the accident meaning the family was able to come up with nearly $40,000 per year for tuition for these 2 grade schoolers. Confirmation both attended Park found here using edit-"find on this page"-Gemma. It will take you to an article in the schools newspaper about a fundraiser for Gemma class of 16, and Graeme class of 13. http://64.233.169.104/u/ParkSchool?q...gl=us&ie=UTF-8

Here are photos of the school's 44,000 square foot Wyman Arts Center: two galleries, an outdoor ampitheater, Meyerhoff Theater, Macks-Fidler Black Box Theater, practice rooms, rehearsal space, and ceramics, 3-D sculpture, woodworking, jewelry, painting, photography, digital graphics studios, recording studio, and keyboard lab. http://www.parkschool.net/slide_show...fm?objectid=13


In a Baltimore Sun article the family claims to be raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nat...,1093633.story


What the article does not mention is that Halsey Frost has owned his own company "Frostworks",since this marriage announcement in the NY Times in 1992 so he chooses to not give himself insurance. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C1A964958260

He also employed his wife as "bookkeeper and operations management" prior to her recent 2007 hire at the "medical publishing firm". As her employer, he apparently denied her health insurance as well. http://www.kaufmanwills.com/section.cfm?id=24


His company, Frostworks, is located at 3701 E BALTIMORE ST. A building that was purchased for $160,000 in 1999. The buildings owner is listed as DIVERSIFIED INDUSTRIAL DESIGN CENTER, LLC whose mailing address is listed as 104 S Collington Ave which is the Frost's home. http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewr...78%20%20%20009 The commercial property he owns is also listed as the business address for another company called Reillys Designs which leads to the question of whether rental income is included in the above mentioned salary total. http://yellowpages.superpages.com/pr...D%3D~lbp_1.htm


The current market value of their improved 3,040 SF home at 104 S Collington Ave is unknown but 113 S COLLINGTON AVE, also an end unit, sold for $485,000 this past March and it was only 2,060 SF. A photo taken in the family's kitchen shows what appears to be a recent remodeling job with granite counter tops and glass front cabinets. http://www.baltimoresun.com/media/ph...9/32837229.jpg


One has to wonder that if time and money can be found to remodel a home, send kids to exclusive private schools, purchase commercial property and run your own business... maybe money can be found for other things...maybe Dad should drop his woodworking hobby and get a real job that offers health insurance rather than making people like me (also with 4 kids in a 600sf smaller house and tuition $16,000 less per kid and no commercial property ownership) pay for it in my taxes.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1907687/posts



Mark Steyn has more here.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/pos...lhOGU3NjNlZDA=

Brother, can you spare a CHIP?

This would seem to be a fairly typical media trajectory. The Democrats sign up a sick kid to read their Saturday morning radio address. As Paul Krugman has observed, Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of us heartless *******s on the right were no doubt too busy laughing to pay attention. But the respectable media were very taken by it: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07275/822113-35.stm


Of course not. And nor does The Baltimore Sun, which did a nice fluffy soft-focus story typing out the Dems' press release and not querying a word:

Insureblog, also demonstrating more journalistic initiative than Mr Hay Brown, checked out that last bit:

Doesn't anyone bother to check the facts?

But who needs facts when you've got the human-interest angle sewn up?

Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and tough choices. But, if this is the face of the "needy" in America, then no-one is not needy. And, if everyone needs assistance from the federal government, so be it. But I don't think I want to drive down the road where Bonnie Frost wants to take us - because at the end of it there are no free-born citizens, just a nation where everyone is a ward of the state.


If it ever occurred to Matthew Hay Brown, the Sun's "reporter", to look into just what kind of "woodworking" Mr Frost did, he managed to suppress the urge.

"icwhatudo" at Free Republic, however, showed rather more curiosity than the professional reporter paid to investigate the story and did a bit of Googling. Mr Frost, the "woodworker", owns his own design company and the commercial property it operates from, part of which space he also rents out; they have a 3,000-sq-ft home on a street where a 2,000-sq-ft home recently sold for half a million dollars; he was able to afford to send two children simultaneously to a $20,000-a-year private school; his father and grandfather were successful New York designers and architects; etc. This is apparently the new definition of "working families":

__________________
Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

tngirl

The government already controls too much of my day to day living...they don't need to be controlling my health care.

__________________
It is the Right of the People to Alter or Abolish Government

Jolie Rouge

Dr. Howard Dean doesn’t give a damn about doing more harm than good. I just got a mass e-mail from Dean pimping Graeme Frost’s story and pushing for the CHIP veto override:


Interesting that public schools aren’t good enough for their kids but public health insurance is. If business owners with half-million-dollar-plus homes and kids in expensive private schools now count as ‘working families,’ does this mean they’ll get tax cuts?

I daresay that If Mr. Frost can afford a $400,000 house he could easily find private health insurance to cover his family. But that’s not the point. The blatant dishonesty of the Democrats in using a 12 year old as a prop in a political soap opera whose family’s financial situation was misrepresented should be exposed for the cheap trick it was. If the President had dared to be that dishonest, the press would have been all over him. Instead, the media has played along with the Democrats and will make it appear that the President and Republicans are heartless monsters for denying little Graeme and his family the benefits they deserve. A pretty low manuever by the Democrats.

It’s par for the course. The use of Graeme Frost was part of a larger left-wing strategy to hide behind children and use them as cannon fodder in their losing bid to get S-CHIP passed into law. Predictably, the reflexive left is already lambasting those who scrutinized the Frosts’ case. “Class warfare?” Blame Democrats, not Republicans for that. If you can’t see the inherent unfairness in forcing people with lesser means pay for the health care of those with greater means who choose to forego health insurance to pay for other things (houses, cars, real estate, private schools), your partisan blindness is incurable.

The Frosts pushed their children into the political arena. They were joined by other parents who loaned their tots to the leftist cause for a full-press on CHIP. Children were trotted out last week pulling red wagons with signs like this…



…and recording ads like these…


Kids warn conservatives on SCHIP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMitrtE4N4A&eurl=

Families USA "Bush VS Kids" SCHIP ads

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql1vW0OK4YE&eurl=

__________________
Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

Jolie Rouge

Will Canada's socialized medicine kill a hero?
By David HaLevi

http://www.TransplantNow.org/

Baruch Tegegne, the man credited with rescuing hundreds if not thousands of his fellow Ethiopian Jews from famine and death, is now in a fight for his own life.

In the second group of Ethiopian Jews brought to Israel in the 1950's by Israel's second president Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi and educated in AMIT religious schools, Baruch met a Canadian Jewish woman in Israel. They married and moved to Montreal 1979. His dramatic escape by foot from Ethiopia in 1974 to get to Israel and his activism for rescue of Ethiopian Jews was featured in the 1983 documentary "Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews."

Among those supportive of Baruch's rescue efforts was Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, considered by many to be the leading Orthodox rabbinic scholar of the last half of the 20th century. Now 61, Baruch has advanced kidney disease caused by diabetes. He undergoes dialysis four times a week at the Jewish General Hospital. His health is rapidly deteriorating.

But his fight is against more than advanced kidney disease. It is against the state-controlled Canadian health system.

A group of his friends led by Emmy Award winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici searched for a person willing to donate a kidney to a complete stranger. They found one, Shree Dhar, through a website that connects live persons willing to donate an organ - without compensation - to strangers.

But Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital refuses to do the transplant for what it claims are "ethical" reasons.

Dr. Douglas Keith, head of the hospital's living donor transplant program, says the hospital could not be sure there is no "quid pro quo" agreement between Tegegne and Dhar. He also says the donation looks suspicious because the donor is from the Third World and contact was made on the Internet.

Dhar has repeatedly stated that his motives are pure, and that he is not looking for money or to immigrate to Canada.

He says he is motivated by religious conviction and is moved by Tegegne's story. Dhar also wants to honor his grandfather, an Indian army general who died of kidney disease. "I believe God will be with me," he said.

Canada has no law prohibiting altruistic donations from unrelated persons.

Calls to American transplant centers confirmed that altruistic donations of this type are regularly accepted throughout the United States.

A leading opponent of altruistic transplants is leading Canadian bio-ethicist and professor of philosophy Dr. Arthur Shafer. Shafer's take on the Terri Schiavo case is telling - he was quoted as saying that Schiavo's brain stem had "turned to mush" and that Schiavo - who was starved to death by court order two months ago - was a "vegetable."

In Tegene's case, Canada's Doctor of Death is no less clear. While smirking on Canadian television Dr. Schafer asserted that if Tegegne's potential donor was "truly altruistic," he would donate his kidney to someone closer to home. Following that convoluted logic, no altruistic live-donor organ donation could ever take place.

Jacobovici accuses Royal Victoria Hospital of "arrogance, paranoia and racism" because, [like Dr. Schafer,] "it assumes that anyone donating kidney, especially if they are from the Third World, are doing it for the money and not for noble reasons. "They're treating live donors as guilty until proven innocent and thousands of Canadians are left to die as a result."

Each year, 200 Canadians die waiting for transplants.

The Canadian healthcare system is often held up as a model for a proposed national healthcare plan in the United States like the one then-First Lady Hillary Clinton proposed in 1994.

Few Americans realize the corrosive effect the Canadian system has on the quality of healthcare provided - or not - to Canada's citizens. Inordinately long wait-times and rationing of services are the norm. Canadians wait months for coronary bypass surgery. Some die waiting. A needed MRI can require a six-month wait. And many cutting-edge procedures, drugs and treatments are simply not prescribed because they are not included in the basket of benefits Canadian's receive.

And under federal law, private clinics are not legally allowed to provide services covered by the Canada Health Act, so there is no competition - and nowhere else to turn for help.

Canada is also alleged to hold down drug prices by extorting American pharmaceutical companies: Sell Canada drugs below wholesale cost (and sometimes below actual cost) or Canada will buy so-called grey market knock-offs from China.

But in Baruch Tegegne's case, the Canadian system becomes even more bizarre.

A live donor, altruistic transplant with a donor found over the Internet has been done at Toronto General Hospital. But Tegegne cannot simply fly to Toronto to save his life. Canadian national healthcare is not portable. Toronto is in the provence of Ontario. Montreal is in Quebec. Except for emergency, non-elective care, Toronto will not pay for a Montreal citizen's healthcare.

Even though Tegegne needs the transplant to save his life, the transplant is not considered emergency care, so the man who risked his life to save hundreds from certain death now waits quietly for his own.

Michael Bergman, a noted Montreal lawyer is providing pro bono representation for Tegegne. But Tegegne's health makes a protracted legal battle impossible. He simply doesn't have the time.

So Jacobovici and friends have begun raising $200,000 to pay for a transplant outside of Canada. They launched a website, www.TransplantNow.org, and got to work.

An Israeli hospital agreed has agreed to do the transplant. It also cut $70,000 from its fee.

The Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel - the poorest of Israel's poor - raised $20,000 from its own members. And donations have come in from those who have found Baruch's story on the Internet. Still, $100,000 is still needed. "We're at the crunch point now," Jacobovici notes. "We've got about a month to get this done."

Tegegne's story clearly demonstrates the danger of a state-controlled healthcare system. But it also provides the opportunity to send a message and demonstrate that protecting human life is the most important moral value, one that trumps socialized medicine and doctors of death every time.

__________________
Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

Jolie Rouge

There's No Place Like Home
What I learned from my wife's month in the British medical system.
BY DAVID ASMAN

"Mr. Asman, could you come down to the gym? Your wife appears to be having a small problem." In typical British understatement, this was the first word I received of my wife's stroke.

We had arrived in London the night before for a two-week vacation. We spent the day sightseeing and were planning to go to the theater. I decided to take a nap, but my wife wanted to get in a workout in the hotel's gym before theater. Little did either of us know that a tiny blood clot had developed in her leg on the flight to London and was quietly working its way up to her heart. Her workout on the Stairmaster pumped the clot right through a too-porous wall in the heart on a direct path to the right side of her brain.

Hurrying down to the gym, I suspected that whatever the "small" problem was, we might still have time to make the play. Instead, our lives were about to change fundamentally, and we were both about to experience firsthand the inner workings of British health care.

We spent almost a full month in a British public hospital. We also arranged for a complex medical procedure to be done in one of the few remaining private hospitals in Britain. My wife then spent about three weeks recuperating in a New York City hospital as an inpatient and has since used another city hospital for physical therapy as an outpatient. We thus have had a chance to sample the health diet available under two very different systems of health care. Neither system is without its faults and advantages. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions to modern health care problems, only trade-offs. What follows is a sampling of those tradeoffs as we viewed them firsthand.

As I saw my wife collapsed on the hotel's gym floor, my concern about making the curtain was replaced by a bone-chilling recognition that she was in mortal danger. Despite her protestations that everything was fine, her left side was paralyzed and her eyes were rolling around unfocused. She was making sense, but her words were slurred. Right away I suspected a stroke, even though she is a young, healthy nonsmoker. Over her continuing protests, I knew we had to get her to a hospital right away.

The emergency workers who came within five minutes were wonderful. The two young East Enders looked and sounded for all the world like a couple of skinhead soccer fans, cockney accents and all. But their professionalism in immediately stabilizing my wife and taking her vitals was matched with exceptional kindness. I was moved to tears to see how comforting they were both to my wife and to me. As I was to discover time and again in the British health system, despite the often deplorable conditions of a bankrupt infrastructure, British caregivers--whether nurses, doctors, or ambulance drivers--are extraordinarily kind and hardworking. Since there's no real money to be made in the system, those who get into public medicine do so as a pure vocation. And they show it. In the case of these EMTs, I kick myself for not having noticed their names to later thank them, for almost as soon as they dropped us off at the emergency room of the University College of London Hospital, they disappeared.

Suddenly we were in the hands of British Health Service, and after a battery of tests we were being pressured into officially admitting my wife to UCL. As we discovered later, emergency care is free for everyone in Britain; it's only when one is officially admitted to a hospital that a foreigner begins to pay. I didn't know that. But I did know that I was not about to admit my wife to a hospital that could not diagnose an obviously life-threatening affliction. And even after having given her an MRI, the doctors could not tell if she had a stroke.

Now, the smartest thing I did before we left the hotel was to delay the ambulance driver long enough to run back to my room and grab my wife's cell phone. With that phone I began making about a thousand dollars worth of trans-Atlantic calls, the first of which was to the world-renowned cardiologist Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, who I'm lucky enough to have as my GP. As it turned out, not only did Izzy diagnose the problem correctly, he even suggested a cause for the stroke, which later turned out to be correct. "There's no reason for her to have a stroke except if it's a PFO." I didn't know what Izzy meant, but I wrote down the initials and later found out that a PFO (a patent foramen ovale) is a flap-like opening in the heart through which we get our oxygen in utero. For most of us, the opening closes shortly after birth. But in as many as 30% of us, the flap doesn't seal tight, and that can allow a blood clot to travel through the heart up to the brain. Izzy agreed that I should not admit my wife to UCL but hold out for a hospital that specialized in neurology.

As it happened, the best such hospital in England, Queen's Square Hospital for Neurology, was a short distance away, but it had no beds available. That's when I started dialing furiously again, tracking down contacts and calling in chits with any influential contact around the world for whom I'd ever done a favor. I also got my employer, News Corp., involved, and a team of extremely helpful folks I'd never met worked overtime helping me out.

Suddenly, a bed was found in Queen's Square, and by 2 a.m. my wife was officially admitted to a British public hospital. The neurologist on call that night looked at the same MRI where the emergency doctors had seen nothing and immediately saw that my wife had suffered a severe stroke. It was awful news, but I realized we were finally in the right place.

That first night (or what was left of it) my wife was sent off to intensive care, and the nurses convinced me that I should get a few hours sleep. We found a supply closet, in which there was a small examination table, and the nurses helped me fashion fake pillows and blankets from old supplies. The loving attention of these nurses was touching. But the conditions of the hospital were rather shockingly apparent even then.

The acute brain injury ward to which my wife was assigned the next day consisted of four sections, each having six beds. Whether it was dumb luck or some unseen connection, we ended up with a bed next to a window, through which we could catch a glimpse of the sky. Better yet, the window actually opened, which was also a blessing since the smells wafting through the ward were often overwhelming.

( contines )

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006785

__________________
Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

Jolie Rouge

[quote=Bahet The kids health care was going to be paid for with a tax on cigarettes. [/quote]

I bet most people have no clue where that is quoted from. And those same people ignore that this bill planned to steal from smokers to provide public goods for others.

Then again for some, "democracy" is nothing but a mob taking the away the freedoms of the minority( in this case, smokers).


I also have to add that our state got the voters to approve "Riverboat Gambling" by pledging the profits to go towards education ... "for the kids, for our future" .... do I really need to point out that decades later our rankings in almost all areas of education ( including funding ) are in the toilet.....

__________________
Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

Starlady01

Here we go with the political promises promises promises bit. Some do come thu but at what cost.

ahippiechic

I am a smokers and the taxes on cigarettes are beyond rediculous, especially the excise taxes, which is a tax on a tax, and is supossed to be illegal. That aside, since I pay those taxes, I had MUCh rather they go to children's health care, or any American's healthcare for that matter, then to go to pay for illegals. Here in phx, they go to the Er for everything from a tummy ache to a runny nose, and we end up paying for those who don't pay. Which is most.

(and surely, most people know where that quote came from)

__________________

Starlady01

P.S,

And I ain't just talking about money by cost.

Starlady01

Here in Florida they said that the x amount of money would go toward schools for us letting in scratch off tickets. But then we lost alot of the government funding which means we didn't make out at all.

Jolie Rouge

They have already pledged the monies recieved from the taxes to go to the health issues of American SMOKERS - heart, lung and other ailments as well as research for various cancers.... that is appropriate. BUT how much of that is actually being done ?? Do you really trust POLITICIANS ( of ANY party affiliation ) to do what they promise when we are talking about billions of dollars at their disposale ?

__________________
Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.** a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT! Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?