An earlier Obama lie on health care: His mother's insurance and cancer

Once liars start lying they can't stop, as Mona Charen points out in National Review Online:

Remember Obama's mother? Though the airwaves currently echo with the vow, "If you like your plan . . . ," I keep remembering Obama's account of his mother being denied coverage by her insurance company as she lay dying of cancer.

The moving and infuriating story was a staple on the 2008 campaign trail. His mother had insurance, he explained, but when she came down with cancer, her insurance company claimed that her disease was a "preexisting" condition and refused to pay for her treatment. In a debate with John McCain, Obama said:

For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a preexisting condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.

There would be, if it had been true. But when New York Times reporter Janny Scott researched the issue for her biography of the president’s mother, she discovered letters proving beyond a doubt that CIGNA never denied Dunham coverage for her disease. The dispute was over a disability plan that would have paid some of Dunham's other expenses.

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