Santorum on drugs

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder on Tuesday that she shouldn’t have a problem paying $1 million a year for drugs because Apple’s iPad can cost around $900.

That’s a slightly coarse summary of his recent remarks, but not nearly as coarse as his actual opinions.

My credibility is this big, and sells for this much.

See if you can follow the logic. Some people pay substantial amounts of money for non-essential electronic goods. Therefore, poor people shouldn’t complain at being expected to spend similar sums of money every month of their lives – or however much cash the market demands, which in some cases can be around a million dollars a year – on medical treatment necessary to save their life.

Where do you even start with something like that?

The problem, as this frothy mixture of callousness and self-interest describes it, is that we’re “conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it”.

Yep, apparently I’ve been brainwashed into wanting to live in a world where we actually look after each other. Socialist propaganda has convinced me that I shouldn’t be content to watch my neighbours die from easily prevented conditions because they can’t afford basic and widely available medical treatment.

He declared that one particular sick child was “alive today because drug companies provide care”, missing the point that he could equally be dead tomorrow because drug companies only provide care if you give them thousands and thousands of dollars.

I want your son to stay alive on much-needed drugs. Fact is, we need companies to have incentives to make drugs. If they don’t have incentives, they won’t make those drugs. We either believe in markets or we don’t.

It may seem heartless, hypocritical, and downright bullshittastic for him to tell this woman that he wants her son to live, while offering no suggestion as to how the obvious barrier of the unaffordability of treatment is supposed to be overcome. But it’s possible he actually believes it. He may honestly think that his advice is the best solution for people like this.

Rick Santorum is a capitalist. As such, he believes that a free market system not entirely unlike the one currently in place, but far less cluttered by government intervention (or at least the kind that doesn’t favour it), is the best way to achieve important things, such as developing and distributing life-saving medical treatments.

So he’s extended this idea to what seems like a logical conclusion: that if families like this aren’t expected to pay whatever medical fees arise if they’re unfortunate enough to face a medical crisis, these life-saving drugs would never be created in the first place. Laying down that kind of ultimatum is the only way we can expect to get any useful work done.

It’s sad that sometimes people have to die to keep the system going, but what other way could there possibly be?

What a tragically bleak view of the world.