Obama says he won't give up on Melanie Shouse's dream of health care reform
By Michael Sorkin
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/06/2010
Melanie Shouse believed Barack Obama could reform health care, and the St. Louis activist worked hard to help get him to the White House.
She died last Saturday from breast cancer while battling her insurance company to pay for her chemotherapy treatment.
On Thursday night, President Obama cited her case in promising to continue working for health care legislation.
In a speech, Obama spoke of Shouse's death and her obituary in the Post-Dispatch.
"How can I say to her ... 'We're giving up'?" Obama said....
Shouse, 41, of Overland, died after a 41/2-year battle with breast cancer.
Her obituary reported that she waited months to go to a doctor after she began to feel sick in 2005. She explained that she could only afford so-called "catastrophic" health insurance — a policy that required her to pay out $5,000 in deductibles before the insurance kicked in.
Shouse spent the last years of her life advocating that consumers "take on the Big Insurance Monopoly and liberate American families from the slavery of skyrocketing insurance premiums and canceled coverage, which leave millions of us in a state of perpetual fear and insecurity."...
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