Healthcare Horror Story in Clinton Stump Speech Is Bogus

On April 3, the Washington Post reported on a "heart-rending anecdote" that Hillary Clinton used regularly in her stump speeches.

I remember listening to a story about a young woman in a small town along the Ohio River, in Meigs County, who worked in a pizza parlor.... She got pregnant, she started having problems. There's no hospital left in Meigs County, so she had to go to a neighboring county. She showed up, and the hospital said, 'You know, you've got to give us $100 before we can see you.' She didn't have $100. So the young woman went back home.The next time she went back, she was in an ambulance. It turned out she lost the baby. She was airlifted to Columbus. And after heroic efforts at the medical center, she died."

The New York Times picked up the story on April 5, when an executive of the hospital in question demanded that the Clinton campaign stop repeating the story, which they asserted was false.

Hospital administrators told the Times that the woman, Trina Bachtel, "was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured." The woman did die in August 2007, "two weeks after baby boy was stillborn," according to the Times

The Clinton campaign "apparently did not adequately check the story," the Post's Ann Kornblut charitably suggested.