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The New York Times - Oct 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/opinion/12krugman.html

Sliming Graeme Frost

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Two weeks ago, the Democratic response to President Bush’s weekly radio
address was delivered by a 12-year-old, Graeme Frost. Graeme, who along
with his sister received severe brain injuries in a 2004 car crash and
continues to need physical therapy, is a beneficiary of the State
Children’s Health Insurance Program. Mr. Bush has vetoed a bipartisan
bill that would have expanded that program to cover millions of
children who would otherwise have been uninsured.

What followed should serve as a teaching moment.

First, some background. The Frosts and their four children are exactly
the kind of people S-chip was intended to help: working Americans who
can’t afford private health insurance.

The parents have a combined income of about $45,000, and don’t receive
health insurance from employers. When they looked into buying insurance
on their own before the accident, they found that it would cost $1,200
a month — a prohibitive sum given their income. After the accident,
when their children needed expensive care, they couldn’t get insurance
at any price.

Fortunately, they received help from Maryland’s S-chip program. The
state has relatively restrictive rules for eligibility: children must
come from a family with an income under 200 percent of the poverty
line. For families with four children that’s $55,220, so the Frosts
clearly qualified.

Graeme Frost, then, is exactly the kind of child the program is
intended to help. But that didn’t stop the right from mounting an
all-out smear campaign against him and his family.

Soon after the radio address, right-wing bloggers began insisting that
the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend
private schools (they’re on scholarship), because they have a house in
a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought
their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and
considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was
dissolved in 1999).

You might be tempted to say that bloggers make unfounded accusations
all the time. But we’re not talking about some obscure fringe. The
charge was led by Michelle Malkin, who according to Technorati has the
most-trafficked right-wing blog on the Internet, and in addition to
blogging has a nationally syndicated column, writes for National Review
and is a frequent guest on Fox News.

The attack on Graeme’s family was also quickly picked up by Rush
Limbaugh, who is so important a player in the right-wing universe that
he has had multiple exclusive interviews with Vice President Dick
Cheney.

And G.O.P. politicians were eager to join in the smear. The New York
Times reported that Republicans in Congress “were gearing up to use
Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program
to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance” but had
“backed off” as the case fell apart.

In fact, however, Republicans had already made their first move: an
e-mail message from the office of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority
leader, sent to reporters and obtained by the Web site Think Progress,
repeated the smears against the Frosts and asked: “Could the Dems
really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?”

And the attempt to spin the media worked, to some extent: despite
reporting that has thoroughly debunked the smears, a CNN report
yesterday suggested that the Democrats had made “a tactical error in
holding up Graeme as their poster child,” and closely echoed the
language of the e-mail from Mr. McConnell’s office.

All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the
modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its
routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate.
If service members oppose a Republican war, they’re “phony soldiers”;
if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he’s faking his
Parkinson’s symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case
for a government health insurance program, he’s a fraud.

Meanwhile, leading conservative politicians, far from trying to
distance themselves from these smears, rush to embrace them. And some
people in the news media are still willing to be used as patsies.

Politics aside, the Graeme Frost case demonstrates the true depth of
the health care crisis: every other advanced country has universal
health insurance, but in America, insurance is now out of reach for
many hard-working families, even if they have incomes some might call
middle-class.

And there’s one more point that should not be forgotten: ultimately,
this isn’t about the Frost parents. It’s about Graeme Frost and his
sister.

I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical
care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad
choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on
one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by
punishing their injured children.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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