AP: Obama invokes grandmother's death in health debate

[jefferson_dem]

Here's the AP story - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090816/ap_on_go_pr_wh/obama_town_hall

Personalizing the issue was a keen move by Obama, and I think the debate is about to shift in a favorable direction.

It will be fun to watch the haters bitch and moan about how Obama is desperate and "playing the sympathy card"...which will only serve to alienate the same seniors they've been courting with their "death panel" lies.

[jefferson_dem]

1. BTW, sludge has linked to the AP lede and the foamers have already started in Twitterland.

:popcorn:

[vaberella]

11. Obama is smart..however my sister said this as well when people talked about the death panel thing.

She was like, "The man lost his grandmother...and cried in public about it during the primaries. What could make Seniors think he'd be out to get them?"

[Pirate Smile]

2. Love the 1st sentence/paragraph: " Now, it's personal."

[Tiggeroshii]

3. um "shit?"

Or shift? Not sure if that's an intentional typo or not.

[jefferson_dem]

4. LOL. That was a typo. Thanks.

[Tiggeroshii]

9. hehe np ^^

[Cha]

5. The deadenders will be bitching and moaning

with or without Pres Obama talking about his grandmother so I'm glad he brought up Toot to personalized it.


.."I just lost my grandmother last year. I know what it's like to watch somebody you love, who's aging, deteriorate and have to struggle with that," an impassioned Obama told a crowd as he spoke of Madelyn Payne Dunham. He took issue with "the notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma."

"When you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest — especially when I hear the arguments coming from members of Congress in the other party who, turns out, sponsored similar provisions," Obama said.

In a debate in which he often sounds professor-like, Obama spoke with a rare bit of emotion that seemed to counter that of vocal health care opponents as he referenced the beloved grandmother who helped raise him and who he called "Toot." She died of cancer at age 86 on Nov. 2, two days before he won election to become the nation's first African-American president.

He talked about her death while answering a question about misinformation being spread about Democratic health care efforts during a town hall style gathering in a high school gymnasium."

[jberryhill]

6. Sympathy?

Are you kidding?

Freepers think that he killed his grandmother because she knew where the REAL birth certificate was.

These people are beyond stupid.

[Drunken Irishman]

12. No. No. No.

He killed his grandma to gain the sympathy vote leading up to the election - even though he was up by 10-points in the polls. :eyes:

[rurallib]

7. Don't forget that AP is owned by the Moonies.

[Crunchy Frog]

8. No. That's UPI.

[rurallib]

13. I stand corrected. Thank you. Someplace I picked up the AP meme.

[vaberella]

10. JD do you have a link to the entirety of Obama's speech in Colorado?

I wasn't able to see it.

[jody]

14. But earlier Obama used his grandmother to open debate on rationing health care.

President Obama's Grandmother and the Ethics of Health Care Reform

So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.

* * * * * * * * *

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.

...I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

The President has done two key things here. First, he has started to discuss resource allocation and rationing in down-to-earth, personal terms. The question of whether to do a hip replacement is a truly challenging clinical as well as ethical decision. This wasn't a situation of "flogging" his grandmother with a chemotherapy that offered a small chance of minor extension of life but at the cost of major side effects and high expenditures. If the President's grandmother had nine months of life in store and the hip replacement went well, the operation could have contributed to a significant improvement in quality of life for many months, but her heart condition and the cancer made the procedure riskier. What to do was a tough question.

Two of Obama's key appointments support rationing health care:

Cass R. Sunstein, head of White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs published "Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay"

Ezekiel J Emanuel, adviser to Obama on the health care bill co-authored "Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions"