It's touching to listen to a guy whose net worth is somewhere between $1 million and $3 million who has a nice fat contributor contract with CNN whine about health insurance.
Not really. It's annoying, and it's especially annoying when Rick Santorum is the guy whining. After John McCain announced his opposition to Graham-Cassidy earlier today, Santorum went on CNN to rage.
When asked about pre-existing conditions, Santorum put all on his disabled daughter.
"My health insurance premiums are over $30,000 a year for a silver plan." he whined. "My deductibles are about $10,000 a year." That's about $277/month per person covered, if he's still covering himself and his spouse and seven kids, one of whom has a pre-existing condition which requires a LOT of medical care. Santorum and his wife are both over 50 too, which means they're in the vortex of the most expensive rate band. Under the Graham-Cassidy bill, they'd be charged 66 percent more.
I mean, without the ACA his daughter wouldn't even be covered at all! He would have to go work for a corporation, or figure something else out, and he would be charged a lot more because before the ACA insurers could simply have cut his little girl off after she reached her lifetime cap or refused to insure her at all.
Someone should tell him about Bernie's plan for Medicare for All! That would solve all of his complaints. But I digress.
"I buy insurance because i have a daughter with a pre-existing condition," he said. "If I had healthy kids I might be an off label than what's on Obamacare exchanges."
In other words, if he didn't have a daughter who desperately needed health care that was very expensive, Santorum wouldn't bother with decent health insurance and would instead pay for junk insurance and pay the penalty for not insuring his family.
Personal responsibility! Socializing the losses now, but he'd totally be privatizing the profit if he just didn't have that disabled daughter to worry about.
Santorum then went on to lie about affordability. He is complaining about his premiums and deductibles while ignoring the fact that he makes so much money he isn't eligible for government subsidies, but this is not true of others. It's hard for me to feel sorry for a guy who makes well into six figures for lying to the American public because he has to pay about one percent of what he would otherwise pay for his one child's care.
Again, I repeat! He is going in the wrong direction here. He should be asking how he can facilitate universal coverage instead of working to rip it away from people.
Icing the cake, Santorum went on to say, "What we do in the bill is we say to the states, you have to cover people with pre-existing conditions but we'll give you flexibility on how to do it."
He then claims that the states will miraculously make it totally affordable and easy for those people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage under Graham-Cassidy. It's like a miracle!
By the way, I have no explanation for why Santorum is pretending he's still in the Senate and is cosponsoring this crap bill, but the way he was talking here, you'd think the damn bill was his ninth child.
The rest of the interview is just a lot of lies, smoke and mirrors about the magic of how this cruel bill will actually be great for folks with pre-existing conditions.
This is the right wing, right here. A guy with a severely disabled daughter who needs high-quality health care blames his own child for having to shell out more than he'd like for her health care.
What a guy.
