Here he goes, in his desperate and vanity-driven drive for presidency, once again:
Santorum, a father of seven and a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, said he wrestles with balancing time with his family and the campaign trail as he explores a presidential bid, but his passion for repealing the federal health care reform law is part of what fuels his political aspirations. "I look at how society with socialized medicine treats children like Bella [his daughter, who was born with a genetic abnormality], and children like Bella don't survive," Santorum told The Des Moines Register today, the first leg of a three-day swing through Iowa. "Children like Bella are not given the treatment that other children are given." Santorum said the new health care law, championed by President Barack Obama, will mean disabled people are denied care more often, and repealing it is the best way to address mounting national debt.How dare he? Where does he get the idea that children like his daughter don't survive in countries with socialized medicine? In Great Britain or Canada? And the US is not doing very well in international comparisons of infant mortality, either.
This is like that 2009 American interpretation of the chances that Stephen Hawking would have survived in one of those death panel countries:
In an editorial on July 31, Investor's Business Daily warned of end-of-life counseling in health care reform by saying people like Stephen Hawking "wouldn't have a chance" in the such a system.
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
In fact, Professor Hawking lives in England, where he has been treated by their National Health Service. And by his own account, it saved his life.
And what about the United States of America? Santorum does admit that some problems exist:
Santorum said that disabled children are denied care today.Budgetarily-driven? What does Santorum think private health insurance companies are? Charities? Suppose that you have child who needs 30,000 dollars worth of treatment every year? Will your insurance company just agree to pay for all of it or will their be all sorts of lifetime caps and other limitations, hmh? And what about a severely autistic child or young adult who really needs long-term residential care? Does the money for that care fall down like manna from heaven in this here great country?
“It’s not like this isn’t happening now,” he said. “But it will happen more under a much more budgetarily-driven health care system.”
No. The most expensive cases end up in the budgets of the states, in most cases, and what have we learned about the states, recently? They are cutting, cutting and cutting.
It is not the smearing of other health care systems that angers me so much about Santorum's inane statements, but the way the sufferings of Americans under the free-market-for-all-who-can-pay system are so minimized and belittled.
That is what angers me about all that death-panels crap. You don't have to have an explicit death panel if the price of care is set high enough. You don't have to have an explicit death panel if insurers decide whether your expensive cancer surgery will be covered. You don't have to have explicit death panels if states decide to solve their budget problems by no longer covering the care of the most expensive medical cases. But the outcome will be the same.