Excerpt From 'Rick Santorum: Obamacare Poster Boy'
'By cashing in on his senatorial connections to join the 1 percent, Santorum managed to escape the crippling debt that can come with raising a disabled child. But his tax returns appear to show how expensive caring for a disabled child can be under the current health care system, even for someone with health insurance. In 2009 and 2010, the Santorums racked up $100,000 in medical expenses—more than the median American family income each year—and that's after their private insurance paid some costs. During that same time period, they also had nearly $100,000 worth of household assistance—help they didn't have in 2007, before Bella was born. (The Santorum campaign did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about the exact nature of these expenses.)
"The financial implications [of having a disabled child] can be pretty catastrophic pretty fast," says Katy Neas, senior vice president for government affairs at Easter Seals, which provides services to more than a million disabled people every year. "Families end up losing everything because of health care costs." She says the medical expenses the Santorums have incurred aren't unusual for families with disabled children. Private insurance plans, she says, don't meet these kids' needs, largely because they impose tight limits on payments for the various therapies disabled kids require. And until the Obama health care reform law passed, insurers simply wouldn't cover many disabled children.'
---Stephanie Mencimer in Mother Jones
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