Posted on 10/06/2007 10:42:57 PM PDT by icwhatudo
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.
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.
In a Baltimore Sun article the family claims to be raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. "Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work."
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. 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.
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. 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
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
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.
Another lie by a democrat? Who da thunk it?
Especially if She Who Must Not Be Named's $5000 per kid bond measure goes through.
“If I could speak to him, I would say, ‘You have to sign this bill,’” he told reporters yesterday during his first visit to the Capitol. “I’m guessing he wants this money for Iraq. Our future isn’t in Iraq. It’s here.”
Man, I know I sure talked like this when I was in seventh grade! (not)
This is the real value of "the children" for the DemoCRAT party...irrelevant in the womb, political pawns once outside of the womb.
“I was driving and my car hit black ice and I lost control of it and I slammed into a tree. Gemma hit the tree and Graeme hit a window,” Bonnie said.
Did Bonnie have auto insurance?
How is this any different from the different from the Left's use of "Fake Soldiers" in their war against American? It isn't.
The fact that Americans are too dumb to see the hypocrisy does not bode well for the future of th USA. It does speak volumes at the "integrity" of the Democrat Party.
Goodbye USA... It was so good knowing you.
One of the few cases where I believe that the IRS has a “duty” to take a peek into this family’s finances.... Something smells - on so many levels.
Note that this "poor" child without health insurance was not denied very high quality and specialized health care because he didn't have health insurance. If his parents were truly indigent the entire bill would have been written off by the hospital. In places like Canada and the UK with "free" health care I seriously doubt this kid would be alive as the level of care he received is not readily available.
If these children were injured in a traffic accident where another vehicle were involved could at least part of their medical bill also have been picked up under the bodily injury provisions that are a mandatory part of auto insurance in most states?
IIRC, the minimum first party insurance benefits for injuries sustained in an automobile accident is $22,500 per person, and many people have more than the minimum.
A truth well stated, Mark!
What was really EVIL about the SCHIP program was that the entitlement was GUARANTEE FUNDED!!!
IOW
IF cigarette tax revenue was not enough, the law required the federal government to cut OTHER programs to make up the shortfalls.
GWBush should have had a MAJOR veto program, he should have made a BIG deal about being responsible.
BTT.
Aura of migraine?
I smell unreported income.
I have been a bookkeeper for small business owners for over 30 years. I know there is a certain amount of skimming, most of which I never saw, there fore I could not advise on not doing it.
In order to pay that kind of school tuition, pay mortgages, buy groceries, pay utilities, there is no way it can be done on a gross income of $45,000 a year. Even if the income is misstated, and it is a net income of $45,000, once you pay out $40,000 for tuition, how in the dickens does a family live on $5000 a year????
This is a ripe situation for the Republicans to disect the banks accounts and life style of this couple and their kids and expose them loudly for the liars they are.
The Demorats just get dumber and dumber. The Republican candidates need to use that ammunition and soon.
Ah, it was a car accident. Medical Payments Coverage is an option, when you buy car insurance. Did they save money by going without coverage?”
In the last 3 states that I have lived in, Medical Insurance is NOT an option. Where is it an option????
The dems have proven that once you get the symbolism out there, and there's very little coverage out there--except in locations where Republicans can read it and know about it...you still have your base and those that don't pay attention to anything but their daily lives that believe your symbolism, and you win.
SAD ...so very sad...but very, very true.
Families USA Board of Directors:
Jarrett Barrios
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation
Kathy Bonk
Communications Consortium Media Center
Gordon Bonnyman
Tennessee Justice Center
James M. Christian
Universal Development Enterprises, Inc.
Robert Crittenden, M.D. Chief of Family Medicine Service, Harborview
Medical Center
Jack Ebeler
Ebeler Consulting
Bob Edgar
Common Cause
Mary Kay Henry
SEIU
Jeff Kirsch
Fight Crime: Invest in Kids
John McDonough
Health Care for All
Angela Monson
Oklahoma University
Health Sciences Center
Philippe Villers
President and Co-Founder of Families USA Foundation
Ron Pollack
Executive Director and
Vice President
******
Families USA
Families USA, the national organization for health care consumers. Families USA’s mission is to achieve high-quality, affordable health coverage for everyone in the U.S.
Soros Advocacy Fellowship for Physicians
Robert Crittenden, MD, MPH collaborated with Washington Citizen Action Education and Research Fund to build public support and to ensure access to quality health services for low income people.
Soros Advocacy Fellow Robert Crittenden, M.D., M.P.H., about the high cost of health care for the average family. He discusses the fact that concierge health care, where patients pay a fee for enhanced services from their doctor, will make primary care inaccessible to many families.
Dr. Crittenden was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow with Senator George Mitchell, and a health policy advisor to Governor Gardner of Washington.
Dr. Crittenden has been President of the Rainier Institute and a Soros Fellow. He is currently Chair of the Working for Health Coalition in Washington State that focuses public dialogue on safety net issues. He is also the Executive Director of the Herndon Alliance, a nation coalition of about 50 organizations focusing on increasing the base of people supporting affordable health care for all people in America.
In seeing the need for children to have care, not simply insurance, Robert A. Crittenden, M.D., M.P.H. created Kids Get Care (KGC), a program within the King County Health Action Plan that places care as the primary focus to ensure that children receive early integrative and preventative physical, developmental, mental, and oral health services through attachment to a healthcare home.
Jarrett Barrios
Senator Jarrett Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat who has been an outspoken advocate for minorities and gay marriage, confirmed today that he will leave office in early July to become the president of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.
An ambitious lawmaker who clearly enjoyed the political fray, Barrios served as a state representative from 1999 to 2002, before becoming a state senator.
Barrios said the new position will allow him to make a bigger difference on the issues he cares about, especially increasing access to quality, affordable healthcare for people of color.
Barrios said he would make slightly more money in this position than he earns from his Senate position and his law practice.
Barrios, an openly gay, Latino lawmaker who married his partner after the state’s high court legalized same-sex marriage.
who counts among his pet causes a living wage for human-services workers, Clean Elections, funding for bilingual education, and domestic-partnership benefits for gay municipal workers.
He grew up in Tampa, Florida, where his Cuban-immigrant grandparents rolled cigars in a factory. His father was a carpenter; his mother, a social worker.
He served as a political intern to former Boston city councilor David Scondras. He worked on the campaigns of progressive politicians such as Scondras and former Boston city councilor Rosario Salerno.
his life partner, Doug Hattaway. Hattaway, a spokesman for Senate majority leader Tom Daschle and, before that, a press secretary for former vice-president Al Gore’s presidential campaign, is a powerful figure in the Democratic Party. These connections paid dividends for Barrios
Sen. Jarrett Barrios said that he and his partner of more than 10 years could lose health and other benefits if the ban was adopted. Legislators are debating a constitutional amendment that would define marriage.
Kathy Bonk
From 1978 through 1987, Kathy directed the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund’s Media Project.
Kathy has worked on many multi-year, issue-oriented efforts for prominent foundations, for the Open Society Institute, Turner Foundations; and domestic and global women’s issues, for the Ford, Robert Sterling Clark, Gerbode and Packard Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Women Donors Network.
Previously, Kathy served as a public information officer at the U.S. Department of State, and the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. From 1978 to 1987, she directed the Media Project for the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. Kathy is on the board of Families USA, Population Connections and the Center for Law and the Public Interest and is an advisor to Ms. magazine.
Kathy Bonk, coordinator of the National Organization for Women’s Media Task Force, was born in 1953. In 1988, she established the Communications Consortium Media Center (CCMC), a nonprofit organization that helps other organizations use communications strategies for policy change. In 1989, KB was awarded a Kellogg Foundation National Leadership Fellowship, which resulted in the establishment of some of the first family planning clinics in Moscow.
The mission of the Communications Consortium is to use communications strategies for policy change. Over the past 25 years, Kathy has been at the forefront of dozens of media campaigns that marked a sea change in domestic and global policies affecting women, children and families.
Gordon Bonnyman
How Gordon Bonnyman grew from the wealth and privilege of his Knoxville childhood into Tennessee’s most vocal advocate for the dispossessed.
As one of the country’s most prominent social justice lawyers,
At Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Tennessee Justice Center, the Knoxville native has forced the state to reform its prison system and played a key role in the development of TennCare.
Tony Spezia, CEO of Covenant Health and PHP/Cariten. “Thanks to him, we now have medicine by court order. Let the courts decide who gets what types of treatment.”
Bonnyman first became exposed to issues of poverty and race at boarding school in Pottstown, Pa., during the ‘60s.
In college at Princeton and the University of Tennessee, he took a keen interest in the events of the time—Civil Rights movement, Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, he says.
Brian Bonnyman, a Knoxville doctor and Gordon’s younger brother, his sister, Anne, who is an Episcopal minister at a church in Wilmington, Del.
Gordon Sr., who at the time was president of Blue Diamond Coal Company, which owned the Scotia mine. While Gordon Jr. was beginning his career fighting in court for the disadvantaged, his father, Gordon Sr., was trying to deal with the lawsuits that resulted from deaths at Scotia. The surviving families sued for $60 million, and the case was eventually settled in 1980 for $5.9 million.
Bonnyman and another legal aid attorney—Russell Overby—decided to strike out on their own. With a grant from the Tennessee Bar Association, they formed the Tennessee Justice Center. Its goal is to do the things that state’s legal societies could do no longer—most notably, file class action law suits on behalf of the poor.
Bonnyman has headed up the Justice Center’s efforts to provide health care to the poor and uninsured, continuing numerous cases started by Legal Aid.
Covenant Health’s Spezia says that Bonnyman simply doesn’t understand the cost of doing business. “Because of Gordon Bonnyman, the state and the MCO’s are just throwing money away. He’s never had to reckon with reality, and because the state doesn’t have the brains or the will to stand up to him, I think he’ll just keep turning the screws until he perceives that his legacy is going to be killing the program.”
The 1996 Republican Congress had established a conservative agenda that sought to curb low-income Americans’ reliance on federal funds, a move Bonnyman saw as unacceptable. “Suddenly we had clients [to whom] we had to say, ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t represent you anymore,’
That desire for a response culminated in the founding of the Tennessee Justice Center. One of the issues the center currently seeks to address is poor Americans’ access to health care.
And he makes a very good living suing TennCare. His Tennessee Justice Center reported revenue of $704,000 in fiscal year 2002. A significant portion of that revenue is paid by TennCare in the form of legal fees. That’s right. The state of Tennessee pays Bonnyman’s legal fees. He has no incentive to stop the lawsuits, and every incentive to continue them - suing TennCare is how Bonnyman makes a living. TennCare made the Tennessee Justice Center, which Bonnyman formed in 1996 for the express purpose of suing the state of Tennessee on matters related to TennCare and welfare reform.
Gordon Bonnyman, the chief lawyer for enrollees, arguing that TennCare’s financial problems stem from mismanagement and that the cuts will harm the most medically vulnerable.
Philippe Villers
Philippe Villers founded the company Computervision with Marty Allen in 1969. In 1980 he co-founded Automatix, an early robotics company, which he led until 1986. He later served as president of Cognition Corporation for 3 years. He is currently (2006) president of GrainPro, Inc., and board member of a number of high-tech startups, as well as president of Families USA Foundation, which he endowed. [1]
Villers was born in France and came to the United States as a child. He earned a B.A. from Harvard University and an S.M. in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1960. He also holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Ron Pollack
Modern Healthcare named Mr. Pollack one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Health Care. National Journal named him one of the top 25 players in Congress, the Administration, and the lobbying community on Medicare prescription drug benefits.
In 1997, Mr. Pollack was appointed by President Clinton as the sole consumer representative on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. In that capacity, Mr. Pollack helped prepare the Patients’ Bill of Rights that has been enacted by many state legislatures.
Prior to his current position at Families USA, Mr. Pollack was the Dean of the Antioch School of Law.
Mr. Pollack was also the Founding Executive Director of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a leading national organization focused on eliminating hunger in the U.S. Two of his notable accomplishment at FRAC include: (1) arguing two successful cases on the same day in the U.S. Supreme Court to secure food aid for low-income Americans; and (2) the successful federal litigation that resulted in the creation of the WIC program for malnourished mothers and infants.
Mr. Pollack received his law degree from New York University where he was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow.
Bob Edgar
Bob Edgar became the president and CEO of Common Cause. Before that, he was general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA
Edgar serves on the boards of several organizations, including Independent Sector, the National Coalition for Health Care and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. He serves on the board of directors of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, organization that is a principal resource for Congress on environmental and energy issues.
Edgar is well known for his service as a DEMOCRAT
six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives
He often said that his commitments are to Peace, Poverty and Planet Earth — and later added and to Pluralism!
Mary Kay Henry
Mary Kay Henry has devoted her life to helping America’s health caregivers form unions, improve their jobs and the quality of care, and advocate for a more rational and humane health care system.
During her 25 years as an organizer and leader in the nation’s largest health care union, she has played a major role in helping more than half a million health care workers join together in SEIU, negotiate for better working and patient care conditions, and actively shape health care policy at the state and federal levels.
An active champion of health care reform, Mary Kay envisions a U.S. health care system that provides universal coverage and gives front-line caregivers a real voice in patient care. She is a member of the executive board of Families USA, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to the achievement of high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans. She is also a labor adviser to and member of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ Subcommittee on Catholic Health Care.
Mary Kay is active in the fight for immigration reform and gay and lesbian rights. She is a founding member of SEIU’s gay and lesbian Lavender Caucus. She and her partner, Paula Macchello, have been together for 20 years.
Jack Ebeler
Jack Ebeler, MPA, is a consultant in health care policy and health care. He provides counsel on the federal policy environment and the changing health care marketplace, and focuses on how to shape and respond to that environment to achieve better coverage, care and affordability. Jack serves on the Health Care Services Board of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the boards of directors of Families USA and the National Academy of Social Insurance.
In 1995 and 1996 he served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, first as deputy assistant secretary for planning and evaluation/health and then as acting assistant secretary for planning and evaluation. Prior to that he was a principal at the consulting firm Health Policy Alternatives, vice president at HealthPartners in Minnesota, on the staff of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, special assistant to the Administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, (now the CMS), an analyst at the Congressional Research Service and at the federal Medicaid program and as a staff member on Capitol Hill.
Angela Monson
A member of the Oklahoma State Senate from 1993 until November, 2005 and the Oklahoma House of Representatives from November 1990 until her election to the State Senate, Monson was the primary sponsor or co-sponsor of much of the legislation pertaining to health care coverage, financing and delivery systems in Oklahoma, and was one of the chief architects of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, the state’s Medicaid agency.
During her tenure as Health Committee Chair, Monson was instrumental in developing the Conference’s position and actions on the Tobacco Settlement between the states’ attorneys general and the tobacco companies.
She was also a member of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators Executive Committee.
Nationally, Monson served as a member of the Steering Committee of the Reforming States Group, a Milbank Memorial Fund health care initiative, and was also a board member of the Public Health Law Association. In 1998, Monson was appointed to the National Advisory Council to the National Health Service Corps by then Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala.
As a community activist, Monson has been an active member of many community based organizations and previously served as President of the Oklahoma City Branch of the NAACP.
I thought at the time that this story just sounded to set-up and here we are with the true facts thanks to you and other Freepers. This needs to get to the talk radio people for Monday...thanks much
Does anybody know if/where the RAT response is posted online?
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