Priorities ad ties Mitt Romney to cancer death

This post has been updated.

A new ad from a super PAC supporting President Obama ties former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to a family’s loss of health insurance and a woman’s subsequent death from cancer.

It’s the fourth hard-hitting ad from Priorities USA Action that focuses on former workers at companies closed by Romney’s former private equity firm, Bain Capital.

“I don’t think Mitt Romney understands what he’s done to people’s lives by closing the plant,” said Joe Soptic, a former employee at GST Steel in Kansas City, in the ad. He says he lost his health care, and then his wife became ill.

“I don’t know how long she was sick, and I think maybe she didn’t say anything because she knew that we couldn’t afford the insurance,” Soptic adds. When she finally went to the hospital they found out that it was stage-four cancer, he says. She died soon after.

Soptic concludes, “I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone, and furthermore I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”

The Republican candidate left Bain before GST Steel’s 2001 bankruptcy; Obama’s team has argued that the story is fair because Romney was at Bain when the initial investment was made. Politico notes that Ranae Soptic died in 2006, long after the plant closed, and CNN adds that at some points during that time she had insurance through her own employer.

While Obama’s campaign has said they cannot comment on the ad, not knowing the specifics, Soptic told the same story in a May Obama campaign call.

Romney spokesman Ryan Williams called the ad one of many “discredited and dishonest attacks” meant to “conceal the administration’s deplorable economic record.”

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