Rick Santorum: Government-Provided Health Care Is A Plot To Kill People Who Don’t Vote The Right Way

By Ian Millhiser on December 14, 2013 at 3:32 pm

"Rick Santorum: Government-Provided Health Care Is A Plot To Kill People Who Don’t Vote The Right Way"

CREDIT: (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Speaking at a Young Americans for Freedom event on Friday, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) offered an unusual assessment of what happens when “the government is going to be the principal provider of health care for the country.” “It’s actually a pretty clever system,” the former presidential candidate explained, “Take care of the people who can vote and people who can’t vote, get rid of them as quickly as possible by not giving them care so they can’t vote against you.”
Santorum’s suggestion that elected officials will provide health care to their own voters while getting “rid of” the opposing party’s voters followed a more banal warning that conservatives must fight programs that expand health care because they tend to be popular: “When Thatcher ran for prime minister she said — remember this, this is the Iron Lady — she said, ‘The British national health care system is safe in my hands.’ She wasn’t going to take on health care, because she knew once you have people getting free health care from the government, you can’t take it away from them.”
Yet Santorum’s own example refutes his claim that national health care allows an elected leader to essentially entrench themself by selectively murdering their opposition’s voters. Santorum presents no evidence that Thatcher — or for that matter, any other British Prime Minister — used her country’s National Health Service (NHS) to effectively euthanize people who could vote her out of office. Moreover, if such a conspiracy actually does exist, the folks at the NHS are doing a rather incompetent job of preventing the ruling party from being turned out of office. Thatcher’s own Tories were voted out of power in 1997. The Labour government that succeeded those Tories lost power in 2010. Polls show that, if another election were held today, incumbent Tory Prime Minister David Cameron would himself be cast out of office and Labour would regain a substantial majority in the British Parliament.
So if the NHS wants to protect Cameron from all these people planning to vote Labour, it better start making with the killing pretty soon.