In a recent Fox News interview with Chris Wallace, when asked why his charitable contributions last year were only 1.76% compared to 13.8% for Mitt Romney and 14.2% for president Obama, Rick Santorum explained that it was because of the high costs of caring for his disabled daughter, which wasn't covered by his family's health insurance.
Rick Santorum then challenged Wallace to examine past tax returns and confirm that his contributions were higher before his daughter was born. Unfortunately for Santorum, Wallace had pulled his past tax records and found that Santorum's personal charitable contributions were in the 2% range all the way back to 2007, before his daughter was even born.
Now, the obvious take away here is that Santorum is just making excuses for being uncharitable, despite draping himself in the mantle of Christian moral superiority, and is using his disabled daughter to do it. However, there is something more to the situation Santorum describes that is so prohibitive to his ability to be a charitable person.
Santorum told Wallace "we have seven children and one disabled child who we take care of, and she’s very, very expensive. We love her and we cherish the opportunity to take care of her, but it’s an additional expense. We have to have around-the-clock care for her, and our insurance company doesn’t cover it so I have to cover it."
Santorum, who, along with basically every Republican in office, is vehemently opposed to Obamacare and the health care reforms that comprise it, cannot even give the 10% charitable tithing recommended by the church because of the high, uncovered medical costs of caring for his special-needs daughter.
Santorum earns over $1 million per year.
So, if we are to believe Santorum's excuse, a man with a net worth of around $5 million and who earns about $1 million per year can't afford to donate more than 2% of his income to charity because his family is too burdened with the cost of caring for their disabled daughter - because that care is not covered by his health insurance.
If a millionaire is overly burdened by health care costs, how is a middle-class family supposed to handle it?
If a family earning $40,000 per year had a daughter that required the type of 24-hour medical care Santorum's daughter does, how on Earth would they be able to afford it? The clear answer is, they wouldn't. The middle-class family would have to watch their daughter suffer and possibly die due to a lack of resources available to provide her the care she needed. This is the world Santorum and other conservatives want us to live in.
Now, I don't believe for a second that Santorum can't afford to be a more charitable man and still provide for his daughter and the rest of his family. I believe he chooses to only give as much as he does and, frankly, I don't care if he's a charitable cheapskate or not. I'm not beating up on Santorum for not giving away more of his money to the less fortunate, it's his money and he can do whatever he wants with it. My beef is with the fact that, whether it's true or not, Santorum seems to be perfectly ok with living in a country where a millionaire could be so burdened with health care costs that he couldn't be a more charitable person even if he wanted to.
99% of the American people don't make anywhere near $1 million per year. Many of these Americans deal with the same health care issues Santorum's family does, but they don't have anywhere near his wealth and, in most cases, they don't have anywhere near the quality of health insurance Santorum does either.
Again, I'm not saying Santorum should give more money to charity, it's his money, he earned it and he can spend it however he sees fit. All I'm saying is, if you are a millionaire and you are using high, uncovered health care costs as your excuse for why you can't do more with your wealth, then it seems at best counterproductive and at worst downright evil to continue to support the very system that has put you in that situation. Surely, Rick Santorum has to know that he is wealthier and more financially secure than 99% of the American people, so it would follow that he would also know that if health care costs are an excessive financial burden for a man of his exceptional means, that they must be downright crippling for the average American.
Regardless of whether Santorum is simply just lying to cover up for the fact that he's an uncharitable man, the issues he's alleging to be faced with are common for a large percentage of the country. I think it's important for people who are legitimately saddled with high health care costs - to the point that they are faced with the choice of losing everything they have or losing a beloved family member - to know that Rick Santorum is opposed to the current effort to change things for the better.
Rick Santorum is either a liar and a bad Christian for not following the teachings of the bible that as man of his means should be more charitable and caring towards his fellow man or he's in favor of a system that forces hard-working families into making the choice between abject poverty or burying a loved one. Either way, I think we can and should do better than that as a society.
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