Mike Strautmanis, White House Aide With Autistic Son, Fights Rumors (VIDEO)

In a new video on the White House health care rumor-rebutting website, Mike Strautmanis, Chief of Staff for Valerie Jarrett and father of a child with autism, addresses rumors that health insurance reform will deprive children with disabilities of care. "We want to expand Medicaid .. we want to make sure people with disabilities aren't denied coverage," he said. "We want to reform the system to make it better for my child, my family, and yours."

Watch:

The White House also sent out a "viral e-mail" from David Axelrod listing the ways health care reform should improve insurance coverage. The White House aide asks readers to combat "the viral e-mails that fly unchecked and under the radar, spreading all sorts of lies and distortions" by starting "a chain e-mail of our own."

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Comments

[phylliscooper1]

Yes, more like this, first person accounts. How medical care or lack of it impacts the lives of real people, just living with the reality of a need for health care and how it can be improved to best serve those needs.

Nicely done.

[EndangeredJackalope]

This is how you diffuse the crazy misinformation out there.. great video. keep it up WH

[notsopc]

The right keeps saying that we already have the best health care system in the world. What good is having the very best doctors and cutting edge medical technology if only the rich have access to it? The only reasonable conclusion is they want poor people to die and thereby "decrease the surplus population".

[xlntcat]

As usual they are giving you inaccurate information. We are outsourcing healthcare because we are lagging in medicine just like every thing else. If you need certain complex neurological procedures you might could find a trained surgeon in the U S but they would have had very little experience whereas doctors in Eastern Europe have been doing the procedures for the past decade.

We are behind Taiwan and India in cutting edge medical technology. Western Europe and Canada have a higher life expectancy, We are 19th in preventable death among industrialized nations and 2nd in infant mortality rate. Hospitalization in a U S hospital is the 29th leading cause of death, All we have is the most expensive healthcare system in the world.

[schatsie]

AND we lead the world in Autism and Alzheimers­....

[BetteB]

I concur notsopc. It makes as much sense as putting the new life saving technology such as the car braking for you if you mess-up, or sensors for close nouns (people, places, and things), in the most expensive cars. This technology that is good for society, will help keep people safe, should be specifically for the cars of those driving with impaired vision (it is legal to drive with only one eye!). Then it goes in other vehicles as the use to a healthy society active in the pursuit of happiness is in relation to what the person does in society indicates appropriate. Refuse workers/recyclers then would come right after our all inclusive doctors in our new single-payer system and more evolved society.
Love
Bette

[masha2008]

you need more than this. you need people to mobilize. you need people to counter the non-sense on the streets.

you are just preaching to the choir at this point. you need the choir off their a.s.ses to take the country back.

[xlntcat]

You are right. The insurance companies and lobbiest have out organized and are certainly outspending. The media, as always, caters to the loud and rowdy so it is the protesters that won't to kill healthcare that are winning the war.

[Gracie1]

I agree--Write to the Editors of Local News and Papers--unless they hear from us--we do not exist-- I was not expecting a response, but got one-direct from the manager of the station. We do not exist unless our voices are out there-

[mamapanya]

Right on masha 2008!
There needs to be a more methodical and overwhelming response to this total nonsense! How can this nonsense take over the agenda? In the name of freedom of speech (more like freedom to spew hate, fear and verbal mumbo jumbo about socialism) we are going to all get locked into this never ending, never solvable nightmare of high premiums and terrible health care options.

[huffingt]

We don't want our country to be like Russia but we will follow Russian Or ly
We are informed citizens, thus follow Pa li n, who sees Russia from her porch
We don't want socialism but social security, unemployment insurance and medicare
We want our country back - back from intellectual people
We don't want govt. bureaucrats; we can elect govt. Mo rans
We don't need to show my birth certificate, but demand others to show theirs
We want States right for governance & succession but could use some stimulus money
We don't want govt control but stand by me at every crises & Katrina in my life
We are Americans so we exercise our rights over others
We are unique in our stu pi dity, so, America is the only place for me
We are not angry mob, unamerican, nor militias, just boring left over teabagans
We ha te color people, but, presently on vacation in Puerto Rico to TAN my skin
We yell at meetings to say- hands off when my foot is in my mouth
We have values, good ones, but hard to practice in C st reet when lights are off
We don't mind false sided F. news when delivered with a tear
We are fearful of death panel as it prohibits us from pulling the plug on my rich relatives
We know amendments –to conceal drugs, alcohol, gu ns & soul mates
We parrot the word constitution means- "Our Fore Fathers and Spouses wrote something

[masha2008]

oh wow. there are no words...

best post ever.

[SFA]

just great!!!

[BetteB]

True story; my 20 year old son who has autism, and that I have been raising as a single mother since he and his twin sister were three, slipped and fractured his Humerus bone and injured his rotator cuff. No orthopedic doctor in my town would accept my son’s SSI/SSD based MediCal (means we are in California, suppose to be the same as Medicare) for follow-up care after the emergency room visit that day, and local primary doctor visit several days hence. They told me that MediCal would not cover their $700 office visit, much less any prescribed treatment to help him heal, so they did not accept it. I had to get a referral to a specialist hours away that took so long that when we went his fracture had apparently healed well enough with my loving care, and the care from All That Is, to make further specialist visits moot. Thank you Absolute Unbounded Oneness, AUO.
Love
Bette

[schatsie]

$700 for an OFFICE VISIT that would last 20 minutes...­Let me think about that...3 visits an hour...210­0 per hour times 1000 hours per year, the man takes 26 weeks of vacation don't you know...But he still "EARNS" $2,100,000 per year......

[BetteB]

The health insurance industry gets a third, the malpractice insurance industry gets some, etc, Big pharma and insurance, they are the betes noires here.
Love
Bette

[DestinationsUnknown]

Is anyone watching Rep Brady R-TX with his chart on cspan?

He is speaking as if that chart the gop created is THE PLAN?

Rep Brady R-TX why are you acting as if this is the final plan?

Why are you misleading ? Congress is PART of Fed plan for millions

[den1953]

Cancer,Autism,Heart Disease,MS,any disease that is devastating to family's does not care if your any person of color,it does not care of your political party,it does not care what religion you are,young or old,what we as a country should care is if there is a cure it should be available to every one.There is no reason in this country that people need to die when then can be cured money and greed should not even be in the equation i hope some day man can finally realize when enough money is enough for him!

[BetteB]

A society that allows for profit health care is a devolving society. It is time to evolve people, really.
Love
Bette

[MontanaSouth]

Yes!

[neocon666]

Communism!

[schatsie]

And think about Drug Resistant TB....Of course those people behind the gates will not contract this from the hired help will they?

[DestinationsUnknown]

Some people are confused with the repetitive question over and over and over and over ----- You know the Murdoch way!


Why can’t we have what you have?


Federal employees - All fed employees have a choice of 100's of private plans

Congress is part of the Federal Employees Group that all chose from the same group of options.

I guess you can say you pay for it because taxes pay salaries- but a premium is deducted- For all federal employees including congress.

There are millions of federal employees! All chose from the same collection of options.

[vgirl1]

What Congress and all Fed employees get is still private health insurance. They get it from a set of insurers who have met government pre-defined requirements to participate in selling to Federal Employees.

The cost of individual plan offerings to Fed employees varies based on the type of coverage the employee chooses, but costs for any given coverage are probably cheaper than they would be to most other insurance buyers except those in large corporations, because the pool of government employees is large enough to have permitted significant leverage on the part of the government in securing lower rates.

[DestinationsUnknown]

Sort of like Wal-mart

they are the largest private employer in the US

[newtom]

So why can't that same plan with all those wonderful choices be expanded to cover anyone who wants it?

[xlntcat]

We pay 2/3 of their premium cost.

[darkmark]

a public health care system is the only moral path to take for any country. except for this one of course. the USofA is purely top and bottom line. morality is for fools, not for great big strong americans.

[neocon666]

Every time I see Glenn Beck cry, I think "crocodile tears".

[OverIt]

You see TEARS????

[Goodtimes09]

Autism can change this country. Just ask the singing man at his City Council Meeting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kuNnnW-7Ws

[riversideliberal]

The usual complaint about the Democrats is that we spend too much on the poor, the uninsured, the helpless. We're too mushy, too impractica­l.... Remember? How does it make sense now to claim that Democrats are cynical, cold-blooded penny-pinchers who would kill sick babies and grandmothers to save the taxpayers a buck?

It is the Republicans who complain about funding special education, medicaid, and other high-cost programs for the poor and handicapped.

And it was governor George W. Bush who signed the "futile care" law in Texas that took 6-month old Sunny Hudson off life support. In GOP-run Texas, the state gets to decide who lives and dies.

[Arleen1]

The more a person of color steps in front of a camera or a mike, the more these people feel like the country has been taken over by some alien entity. On the other hand when that happens, for other families, what they see is a truer representation of the way the country looks. What different views are in play.!

[juhar]

You are so right on.

[PWM]

As a middle aged white male - I have to agree.

[annshirley]

I am so tired of this nonsense. Beck has the money to help his child with her health needs. Yet he is using her to propagate lies. As a parent he should be ashamed of himself. He rather get ratings than let other children with special needs get health care. Trust me most parents of special needs children pay out of pocket for their health needs because some of the procedures are not cover by health ins.
I wish the protesters at these town hall meetings would actually sit down and listen or better yet do some research for themselves. They are drinking the punch without realizing that it is spiked with stuff that will harm them and their families.