An article about Rick Santorum...

...in the Times this morning brought up a couple of issues for me: abortion, and the anniversary yesterday of my father's death two years ago. 

The piece talks about Santorum's three year-old daughter, Bella, who is currently in the hospital with pneumonia (my emphasis): 

Bella, who was born with trisomy 18, a rare disorder that is fatal to most of children within their first year, has become a touchstone for Mr. Santorum, both humanizing him and serving as flashpoint for debate over health care with President Obama.

Mr. Santorum mentions her at almost every appearance, sometimes explaining that his wife is not at his side because she is home caring for her, and sometimes, especially in churches, telling of how when Bella was born, doctors sent her home to die because her disorder was “incompatible with life.”

“It angered us to hear that,” Mr. Santorum explains in a video on his campaign Web site. “She was our daughter like every one of our children and we were not going to let her go.” 
___

Trisomy 18 results in stillbirth for about half the babies carried to term, and 90 percent of children die before their first birthday, said Dr. Robert Marion, chief of genetics and developmental medicine at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

After the first birthday the survival odds increase, he said, although pneumonia is a common cause of hospitalization because trisomy 18 children often have congenital heart diseases that cause fluid to build up in the lungs, causing infections. The condition has become rarer in the past 25 years, Dr. Marion said, “because people are diagnosing it prenatally and terminating the pregnancies more often now.”

That is one of the reasons Mr. Santorum cites Bella in his campaign — an embodiment of his respect for the sanctity of life and a reason he opposes Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul. He opposes its requirement that insurance plans cover prenatal screenings, principally amniocentesis, which he said are used to “cull” fetuses with birth defects.

The procedures “are done by and large to find out late in pregnancy whether the child in the womb has a disability,” Mr. Santorum said in Ohio in February.

Now, leaving the Santorums aside for a moment, imagine that you were a young person and the doctor told you the baby you were carrying had Trisomy 18 and was expected to die within a year. Would it really be so terrible to terminate that pregnancy? And wouldn't it be understandable for a couple to make that choice? 

How about after reading these next two paragraphs?

Dr. Marion, whose program sees about 7,500 children a year with developmental disabilities, said most health insurance does not cover many services the children need and that currently “the government has washed their hands” and there is no public financing for them either.

“It’s not a matter of these kids being squeezed because there’s pressure on the person providing the care,” he said. “What happens is we’re going to have to turn away some kids with trisomy 18 because there’s nobody to pay for it.” 

(By the way, Rick Santorum is a millionaire lobbyist when he isn't running for president.)

So, really, shouldn't the choice to bring that pregnancy to term be left up to the parents?

Next, I thought about my father's death when reading this paragraph:

[Santorum] also maintained that the 2010 health care law, because it was designed in part to slow runaway costs, would lead to “a brave new world” in which doctors are pressured to ration care, and disabled children like his daughter would be denied care.

First of all, we already ration care. And second, we spend an inordinate percentage of our health care dollars in the last six months of a person's life. (I'm too lazy to look up the exact numbers right now, but I've read it many times.)

When my father fell down two years ago and hit his head, causing internal bleeding, the attending doctor summoned the neurosurgeon for emergency brain surgery. Upon hearing this, my wife (who's worked in hospitals and is practically a doctor by my family's standards) expressed surprise. "He's 90 years old! Why don't they just make him as comfortable as possible?"

And she was right. (As usual.) My father, after undergoing surgery, never regained consciousness and died in hospice about ten days later. The bill for those last two weeks? Over $200,000 -- paid for by Medicare, of course.

Now, I don't believe in "death panels" (or much of anything else that comes out of Sarah Palin's mouth), but shouldn't the government -- when footing the bill -- have some say over how its dollars are spent? And in a world of scarce resources, don't we have to make choices? (In the absence of Medicare, I doubt that my father's five kids would have ponied up two hundred grand to prolong the life of a 90 year-old for -- what? -- a few more weeks or months.)

So what would be so terrible with setting up some guidelines about health care spending on seniors? Can't we, at least, cool the heated rhetoric and have a rational discussion on how we spend our precious health care dollars?