Can you imagine a snobbish OBGYN practice in Washington’s snootiest Northwest neighborhood that reserves its coveted morning appointments for “important people” and doesn’t take Medicaid?
If you’re automatically imagining that this clinic is run by a Republican doctor who rails against the Affordable Care Act, however, you’ve got it all wrong: the docs are Dr. Sharon Malone, who is married to Attorney General Eric Holder, and Dr. Marilyn Jerome, who is married to John Foust, who is using his wife in his campaign against Barbara Comstock for Virginia’s 10th Congressional District.
As Free Beacon reporter Elizabeth Harrington observes:
Dr. Jerome claims that her husband is a better candidate because he will never get between a woman and her doctor. “As an OBGYN,” Foust attacks his Republican opponent Barbara Comstock for opposing Medicaid expansion. Failure to expand Medicaid to rural hospitals could be “devastating,” he says.
Dr. Jerome has also written in support of the Affordable Care Act on the Foxhall website, citing the Medicaid expansion as beneficial to low-income women.
“For over 30 years, John’s wife, Dr. Marilyn Jerome has practiced obstetrics and gynecology with Foxhall Ob-Gyn, a practice dedicated to providing compassionate reproductive healthcare for women in NW Washington, D.C., and the surrounding communities,” Foust’s campaign website reads.
It turns out, however, that not all women can receive “compassionate reproductive healthcare” from Foxhall. The practice doesn’t accept Medicaid.
When Harrington decided to investigate the Foxhall practice, she encountered a cornucopia of inequality—one patient informed the reporter that she could never get a morning appointment with Dr. Malone because the receptionist said that such appointments were reserved for “important people.”
The reporter asked a Foxhall receptionist about this:
“That’s not accurate,” the office manager said. “No one here would ever say that, so that’s not true. Where are you getting that from?”
The office manager said it sounded like a “disgruntled patient.”
It’s just that “those appointments tend to fill up first,” she said.
“We don’t have special appointments for special people,” she added.
I told her I had tried to make an appointment for myself and couldn’t get one before 10 a.m.
“Well, we don’t typically start the day that early for a new patient,” she said.
I moved on to a different topic.
The different topic was Medicaid in particular and insurance in general. The reporter wanted to know why the office did not take Medicaid given that the website supports the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid. The office manager responded by suddenly finding an 8:45 am appointment for the reporter.
But then the Democratic docs don’t take much in the way of insurance at all. They are a “primarily fee-for-service” practice. According to the story, the practice accepts the Johns Hopkins health insurance plan and United. The story says that both docs have positive reviews on Vitals.com, a medical review site, but that some patients are required to pay without insurance.
Don’t get me wrong. Doctors Malone and Jerome should be absolutely entitled to run their practice however they want. But you could not ask for a better example of hypocrisy.
The two of them seem to sum up the progressive view: voice the correct policies but get the hell away from the results. The real brunt of the vote-getting, pro-entitlement policies espoused by the Democratic policies can be borne by the middle class and those who would struggle to get into the middle class, if current policies didn’t keep them out. Rail against the 1 percent–but by all means belong to it.
And—really—it is so much more fun to be for the Affordable Care Act than to actually have to live with it, isn’t it Docs?
You owe it to yourself to read the entire Free Beacon story.