Hillary Rodham Clinton is a prodigious consumer of information about healthcare, but one document she doesn't seem to have read (or at least profited from) is a Canadian report titled "Once Upon a Time
Otherwise, she might not have told campaign audiences about Trina Bachtel, a pregnant Ohio woman without health insurance who, Clinton said, had been turned away twice by a hospital that demanded she pay $100 to be examined. In this telling, Bachtel lost her baby, then was airlifted to another hospital, where she died. "It hurts me," Clinton said, extracting her political message from the tragedy, "that in our country, as rich and good of a country as we are, this young woman and her baby died because she couldn't come up with $100 to see the doctor."
What hurt Clinton's campaign was that several "facts" in the story did not hold up. The hospital where Bachtel's child was stillborn told the New York Times that the woman was insured. In fact, she was under the hospital's care and had never been refused treatment.
Critics cite this episode as further evidence that Clinton, already embarrassed by a false memory of braving sniper fire in Bosnia, is a serial fabricator. But she is only the latest politician to succumb to the occupational hazard of packaging policy as parable. The Canadian report argues that debates about healthcare are especially conducive to storytelling because medical decisions involve "choices to be made, obstacles to overcome, breakthroughs, setbacks and conclusions that occasionally warm the heart and often break it."
That is why John Edwards, who withdrew from the 2008 race, was so fond of this anecdote (which at least was firsthand): "A few weeks, ago I met a man named James Lowe in Wise, Va. James spent the first 50 years of his life without a voice -- literally without a voice -- because he didn't have healthcare. All he needed was a simple operation to fix a cleft palate." Edwards also liked to retell a story from this newspaper, in which a patient died amid an argument with her insurance company over an experimental treatment. In real life, the story was as complicated as it was wrenching. In Edwards' version, it was good versus evil.
