March 21, 2024
She was diagnosed with a brain tumor and then she had surgery for it. It's a very strange article in that Frum uses ~20 times as many words to talk about her dog, Ringo, then he does about the final months of her life and those "colds". It smells like guilt to me.
The pandemic passed. Miranda rented an apartment in New York.
[...]
Through the winter, Miranda had suffered a series of bad colds; getting her on the phone had become hard. I texted her, but unusually for her, no swift answer came. [...] The next morning, February 16, we received the devastating news that Miranda had been found dead in her Brooklyn apartment. Illness overwhelmed her depleted immune system and stopped her heart. She collapsed at about three in the morning. When she was found, Ringo was lying beside her.
In other news she lived in Israel for a while because of course she did. Frum rants about her HMO in the usual right-wing way. US healthcare impacts somebody he loves - so he cares.
When Miranda returned from Israel, she had signed up with the least-expensive HMO she could find in California. She was only 26; how much medicine could she possibly need?
The inexpensive HMO had no intention of allowing access to the right doctor. It insisted on assigning Miranda to its in-house team. That team proposed slicing off the top of Miranda's skull and then groping down to her brain stem. The doctors candidly confessed that the chances of success were meager.
When Danielle protested that she had found a doctor who promised a less invasive technique with a better hope of success, the HMO's chief brain surgeon pooh-poohed her. I could have advised him that patronizing Danielle was unlikely to go well, but he kept at it. Then he addressed her as "dear." The room exploded. "I know why you think this operation cannot be done," Danielle said. "Since this variety of tumor was first identified in [I forget the year, but Danielle knew it], there have been [again, Danielle knew the number] successful operations in the United States. You've performed none of them. Maybe that's why you misdiagnosed the tumor in the first place. The doctor we want is the only one who has even recognized it for what it is."
The HMO never relented. Mercifully, we found an opportunity under the Affordable Care Act to shift Miranda to a different insurer that had the right doctor in its network. Miranda's surgery was scheduled for April 2019 at Stanford University Medical Center. In the meantime, she and Ringo came to live with us in Washington, D.C.
Very clearly laying out why the for-profit medical system murdered his daughter
Let's see what David Frum thinks about the public medical system which would have given his daughter adequate treatment to begin with:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-practical-case-against-medicare-for-all/
Oh. Of course he condemns everyone else's children to death while expecting sympathy for his little Romanov.
David "I murdered my own daughter and all I got was this lousy health insurance plan" Frum, a serious person
as a free market economist, i would have simply chosen a health insurance package that provided the necessary utility to survive instead of the one that would kill me.
maybe she didn't offer david frum enough money to pass along this vital knowledge to her, expecting her father to instruct her without compensation. another fool looking for a handout!
I read the whole thing. This reminds me of my parents, who refuse to admit that society had anything to do with my sister’s suicide in NYC thirteen years ago. She also had a small dog like the one featured in this article. To his dying breath, Frum will never admit that his (and especially The Atlantic’s) minimization of covid might have contributed to his daughter’s death.
I shouldn’t be surprised, since words cannot describe how awful Frum is, but it’s still shocking to see.
Wild that the same publication also had Ed Yong who has done some excellent journalism during the pandemic
smells like guilt
It’s highly possible. The mind has lots f room to wander at 3am when you’re in bed and supposed to be sleep. I have no idea who David Frum is but I am more familiar with losing a child than I’d care to be.
My sympathy for the official cheerleader (Bush speechwriter) for the Iraq War is approximately 0%. David Frum would be a total piece of shit for that alone, but of course his shittiness endures into everything else he opines on.
well-compensated by the bourgeoisie for architecting a war, but such a skinflint he doesn't even put his daughter on his health insurance?
He mentioned his wife once or twice but I think that was only for color and misdirection. Something fucky was going on with him and his daughter. Plus she was in NYC all by herself when she was deadly sick?
The more you serve capital, the more having all the riches of the human experience at your fingertips loses meaning as your own experience becomes something less than that.
The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.
I darkly hope we get David Frum publicly posting into self destruction
I hope David Frum gets the In Water ending and we get to read every last scrawled note he leaves on the way
I forgot who this guy was and thought he was the cargo cult guy for a minute
Frum, presumably is a millionaire several times over at this point. When his daughter revealed she was struggling to get adequate treatment, you'd think he'd rush in and be a good dad, promising to pay for her to get the best treatment no matter the cost to him. What's the point in being a ghoul for the monsters in the world if you can't even use that misbegotten wealth to save those around you?
There is after all stories by the hundreds of parents mortgaging their houses, selling off heirlooms or retirement accounts to try and save loved ones when the health crisis hits. I guess Frum is made of tougher stuff he's not downgrading the lifestyle he has come to know and love just to save his flesh and blood.
Or his daughter knew he was a giant piece of shit who worked for some of humanity's worst monsters and has been refusing to talk to him because of the obvious reason.
Regardless Frum comes off terrible. I wish him a miserable torment for the rest of his days. May a bird shit in his eye each morning and a fire consume him before the end. May he receive no pleasure from his actions and only pain. May he see his western civilization crumble before his eyes and only then be granted a release from existence.
