Asked by Chris Wallace why he's only donated 1.7% of his income to charity (contrasted with President Obama whose donated 14% and Mitt Romney whose donated 13%) Rick Santorum essentially blames the out of pocket heath care cost needed to take care of his special needs child, Bella, who was born with a severe genetic disorder.
Bella was born with a pre-existing condition, and his insurance won't cover the cost of care for it - which is strange because according to HealthCare.gov it should be covered.
Now, under the health care law, plans that cover children can no longer exclude, limit, or deny coverage to your child under age 19 solely based on a health problem or disability that your child developed before you applied for coverage. This rule applies to all job-related health plans as well as individual health insurance policies issued after March 23, 2010. The rule will affect your plan as soon as it begins a plan year or policy year on or after September 23, 2010.
Except for this one catch....
The new rule doesn’t apply to “grandfathered” individual health insurance policies. A grandfathered individual health insurance policy is a policy that you bought for yourself or your family (and is not a job-related health plan) on or before March 23, 2010.
Since he left the Senate and then Fox News as a Contributor, Rick Santorum has been effectively "Self-employed". According to his
financial statements his primary income now is from five rental properties he owns in Pennsylvania. As such he's had to buy his own plan, so it's grand-fathered, and doesn't include this protection.
But if he were to change plans now that this has taken effect, or simply get a job it would be covered by his insurance, and then he could donate more to charity (except that he probably won't as Wallace points out he didn't give much more than 2% even before Bella was born).
As Huffingtonpost points out, Santorum is essentially a Millionaire after his stint with Fox News.
Santorum's returns show that his federal income taxes rose from 2007, when he paid $167,000, to $310,000 in 2009, then dropped to $263,000 in 2010. During that same period, his annual income surged from nearly $660,000 in 2007 to $1.1 million in 2009 before slipping to $923,000 in 2010.
That's an awful lot of cash on hand, particularly when you have a special needs child who requires round the clock care. Most people who might have such children,
don't have access to those kinds of funds, which is exactly why the ACA bans the excuse of denying coverage due to "pre-existing conditions".
It's also bans the excuse of "Lifetime Caps" on coverage amounts for individuals.
As Thinkprogress puts it...
By admitting that the health care system has created a financial burden for families, Santorum is essentially conceding the need for the Affordable Care Act. Even though he has repeatedly claimed that children like Bella would receive inferior treatment under “socialized medicine,” the ACA actually guarantees that insurance providers cannot use disabilities like Bella’s as an excuse to deny service, nor can they cap how much money is spent on an individual’s medical benefits. It also prevents insurers from denying or limiting benefits. Children of families that don’t have a million dollars would have a better chance of managing costs.
Rick Santorum has repeated attacked the Affordable Care Act. He's claimed that requiring an employers insurance company to provide preventative care for contraception, without any out-of-pocket costs, care that can prevent not just pregnancy but the spread of STDs, cervical cancer and ovarian cyst is a violation of "religious freedom".
He's claimed that use of amniocentesis to determine the health and status of a baby, would lead to more abortions, if that baby was found to be genetically damaged like Bella.
In Santorum’s Face the Nation interview, host Schieffer referred to a comment Santorum had made on the campaign trail in Columbus, Ohio. Schieffer said, "You sound like you're saying that the purpose of prenatal care is to cause people to have abortions, to get more abortions in this country. … Any number of people would say that's not the purpose at all."
Santorum responded, "Well, Bob, that's simply not true. The bottom line is that a lot of prenatal tests are done to identify deformities in utero, and the customary procedure is to encourage abortions. …
Of course, the fact that it's simply
information that parents can use to better plan and prepare for the care of their child if they choose to take on the heroic, IMO, task of raising a special needs child despite their different ableness. If he had known Bella had genetic disorder would he have aborted her? Doubt it.
Yet he doesn't think other parents should have the necessary information to make up their own minds. He'd rather make that decision for them.
Even the fact-challenged Politifact found Santorum's claim that amniocentesis leads to more abortions to be bull-pucky.
Santorum told Face the Nation, "Amniocentesis does, in fact, result more often than not in this country in abortion." While no agency or organization we spoke with keeps national statistics, researchers and reports we consulted show that more than 90 percent of amniocenteses result in normal diagnoses — and thus often healthy babies. Meanwhile, perhaps half of parents whose fetuses are diagnosed with abnormalities — mostly those with the most severe, untreatable problems — may go on to end their pregnancies. So by the best evidence available, perhaps less than 5 percent of parents who choose amniocentesis choose to end their pregnancies. Santorum’s statement isn’t accurate, and we rate it False.
Santorum has also falsely argued that the ACA would have placed people like Bella on a "Death Panel" list or something. He was a bit vague about it.
BECK: How much of a danger are the most vulnerable in our society if Obamacare actually kicks in and the whole bell curve…
R. SANTORUM: It’s all about utilization, right? It’s all about how do we best allocate resources where they are most effectively used? [...] Government allocating resources best on how to get the best bang for your dollars and it’s all about utility. It’s all about the usefulness of the person to society, instead of the dignity of every human life and the opportunity for people who love and care for people to give them the best possibility to have the best possible life.
This paranoid fantasy isn't part of the ACA. What Santorum is describing here doesn't exist. There is the Independent Payment Advisory Board for Medicare, which began last year. But all they do is create a report on ways to reduce cost in Medicare -
without reducing quality of service - which is submitted to Congress to review. They don't make the decisions on what to do, Congress does.
The Independent Payment Advisory Board will begin operations to develop and submit proposals to Congress and the President aimed at extending the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. The Board is expected to focus on ways to target waste in the system, and recommend ways to reduce costs, improve health outcomes for patients, and expand access to high-quality care. Administrative funding becomes available October 1, 2011.
This isn't anything like what Santorum describes. There's also the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation.
The law establishes a new Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation that will begin testing new ways of delivering care to patients. These methods are expected to improve the quality of care, and reduce the rate of growth in health care costs for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Additionally, by January 1, 2011, HHS will submit a national strategy for quality improvement in health care, including by these programs.
But Santorum would abolish all this. He would repeal the ACA and take away protections from
health discrimination by insurance companies for all those people who don't have $Millions in their Bank Account. He would slow innovation, he would let costs rise, then since he supports the dreaded "Ryan Plan", he would gut Medicare and give it all over to privatized-profitized insurance companies whose costs are as much as 40-60% higher than Medicare.
In fact, he would implement the Ryan strategy for Medicare "even sooner".
Yet right here the Chief Medicare Actuary testifies that the Ryan Plan would shift significant costs onto the backs of Seniors. Many of whom are on a fixed income and can't afford anything above what they're already paying for care.
VAN HOLLEN: In your testimony, you point out that in those cases where your support — the amount of your voucher doesn’t keep pace with the market cost of health care, you may have to choose to either pay a lot more out-of-pocket or not get a health care plan that covers all your needs. Is that correct?
FOSTER: That’s certainly a risk and it’s a pretty important risk.
With the ACA in place children like Bella would have a far
better chance to survive without it putting their parents into bankruptcy. Without it they would have a horrific choice to make, cut back on the care for their child - or risk their own financial survival.
People are making that horrible choice right now. 40,000 of them per year die because of denied or expensive care they can't afford. That's your DEATH PANEL Right there Ricky.
But then what does Santorum care, he can afford it. Chances are you can't and if he and the Republicans have it their way that's just too damn bad for you and your family isn't it?
Vyan