Something tells me there's a little more meat to that story.
It was a meltdown of epic proportions. DUmmies turning on each other, funds that turned up missing ... it was truly spectacular.
Slightly longer version: Andy Stephenson lived in Seattle and was a big hero to the DUmmies who were so thoroughly convinced that W. had stolen the 2004 election. He and his gay lover were neck-deep in DUmmie conspiracy crap about how the dreaded Diebold company had rigged voting machines all across the country to cast ballots for Bush when people were actually voting for Kerry.
Not too terribly long after the 2004 election, Andy announced that he had pancreatic cancer. As memory serves, Andy had quit his job to work full-time on election conspiracy crap, and he couldn't be put onto his gay lover's insurance because the company he worked for
in Seattle didn't recognize gay partnerships or something like that. So, this very quickly took on the rallying cry for everything liberal: oppressed gays, socialized medicine, how horribly unfair ameriKKKa is, etc.
Soon, Andy announced that his
only hope for living was a surgery called a "modified Whipple procedure," which, it was claimed, was only practiced at Johns Hopkins. Since Andy didn't have any health insurance, Johns Hopkins had supposedly named a specific price of $50,000 and they would cruelly just let Andy die if he didn't cough up the money. Promptly, a fund-raiser was started on DU, and DUmmies kicked in all sorts of money hither and yon. People around the internet, most especially at FR and CU, grew suspicious in short order.
Before too terribly long, some more facts started coming out and the whole story started collapsing around Andy and his fundraising. It turned out that there was a hospital literally blocks away from Andy's home in Seattle that had an excellent track record of performing this surgery, and they would gladly have done the procedure on Medicaid (for which Andy would have qualified if he were actually truthful about his financial situation, which he was not) or at a deeply discounted rate for someone who was indigent, with no need to travel to the other side of the country to Johns Hopkins. Questions also arose about just how much money had
actually been raised, where and how it had been spent, and indeed whether Johns Hopkins was actually insisting upon this $50K sum and not offering some sort of financial assistance. It turned out that Andy and his gay lover had
far more financial resources available to them than they had claimed (including a nearly paid-for home with a value near half a million dollars). Some questioned whether Andy had cancer at all, as much of his claimed symptoms more closely resembled pancreatitis rather than cancer. At some point it also came out that Andy's gay lover could have indeed added Andy to his health insurance policy (with no concerns about pre-existing conditions), but didn't want to spend another couple hundred dollars a month to do so.
As more and more whistles were blown about this apparent scam (at least in the sense that there was no
need to go to Johns Hopkins and that Andy had plenty of money available for such a life-and-death situation), the DUmp went fully berserk. Plenty of DUmmies started demanding refunds, or at least some level of accountability, which Andy and his fundraising minions dodged like crazy. DUmmies then started threatening anyone and everyone who ever dared to question whether this fundraiser was a particularly bright move, either financially or medically. The fundraiser, and subsequent questions and meltdowns, lasted for at least a solid six months, an eternity for someone to
not get whatever treatment they can for an aggressive, fast-growing cancer.
Interspersed amongst this chaos were regular treatises on DU about how none of this would be happening if we just had socialized medicine and if gay people weren't so horribly oppressed. DUmmies screeched like banshees at anyone who questioned the veracity of the Andy Scam (as it quickly came to be known; I think Frank is credited with coining that phrase) and started insisting that the FBI was going to investigate and prosecute anyone who dared question Andy. Meanwhile, Andy stubbornly refused to take the medical care that was readily available to him just a short walk from his own home, insisting that the
only way he would survive is if he went to Johns Hopkins.
Ultimately, Andy sacrificed himself on the altar of socialized medicine, DUmmies insisted that any conservative who had ever used the internet during that time period would be prosecuted for first-degree murder and thrown in prison, there was even more of a general meltdown at DU, and in the end, nothing changed for anyone except that Andy died for nothing and a whole lot of moonbats got bilked out of a shit-ton of money: I'm pretty sure that I recall that Frank was able to document at some point something closer to $150K was raised, with no accounting of how it actually got spent. Had Andy simply taken the medical care that was readily available to him when this cancer was discovered, he would likely still be alive today, but he chose to be a martyr for the moonbat agenda instead.
