It’s also nothing new. Twenty-eight states already require organizations that offer prescription insurance to cover contraception and since 98 percent of Catholic women use birth control, many Catholic institutions offer the benefit to their employees. For instance, a Georgetown University spokesperson told ThinkProgress yesterday that employees “have access to health insurance plans offered and designed by national providers to a national pool. These plans include coverage for birth control.”

Similarly, an informal survey conducted by Our Sunday Visitor found that many Catholic colleges have purchased insurance plans that provide contraception benefits:

University of Scranton, for example, appears to specifically cover contraception. The University of San Francisco offers employees two health plans, both of which cover abortion, contraception and sterilization…Also problematic is the Jesuit University of Scranton. One of its health insurance plans, the First Priority HMO, lists a benefit of “contraceptives when used for the purpose of birth control.”

DePaul University in Chicago covers birth control in both its fully insured HMO plan and its self-insured PPO plan and excludes “elective abortion,” said spokesman John Holden, adding that the 1,800 employee-university responded to a complaint from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission several years ago and added artificial contraception as a benefit to its Blue Cross PPO.

Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn., offers employee health insurance via the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, a consortium of Christian Bible and other private college and universities. Its plan excludes abortion, but probably covers artificial contraception as a prescription drug, said C. Gregg Conroy, the executive director of the TICUA Benefit Consortium.

Boston College, the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts, and other Catholic organizations that are located in one of the 28 states that already require employers to provide contraception benefits could have self-insured or stopped offering prescription drug coverage to avoid the mandate — but didn’t do so. Instead, they — like many Catholic hospitals and health care insurers around the country — chose to meet the needs of the overwhelming majority of Catholic women and offer these much needed services.

Uninsured residents will have the option of seeking coverage though TennCare, Tennessee’s version of Medicaid, or qualifying for private insurance through the state’s own health insurance exchange. Others will qualify for coverage under their parents’ health care plans:

The study also reports that Tennessee will save $2.3 billion in cuts to bad debt and uncompensated care, which will aid in funneling more money into the state’s health care system. “Uncompensated care and bad debt will be reduced from $4.11 billion to $1.84 billion, a 55 percent decrease, the study said”:

In spite of this, Tennessee remains slow in making any sort of progress towards meeting federal deadlines for enacting legislation that must be in place in order to receive federal funding for the implementation of key parts of the health care bill. Much of their choice to hold off is based on whether the Supreme Court decides to overturn the ACA or if the potential election of a Republican president would lead to a repeal of the law.

– Fatima Najiy

The candidate also said that the parent and child unjustly felt entitled to get life-saving care at an affordable rate:

GOP contender Rick Santorum had a heated exchange with a mother and her sick young son Wednesday, arguing that drug companies were entitled to charge whatever the market demanded for life-saving therapies.[...]

“People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad,” Santorum said, “but paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it.”

The mother said the boy was on the drug Abilify, used to treat schizophrenia, and that, on paper, its costs would exceed $1 million each year.

Santorum said drugs take years to develop and cost millions of dollars to produce, and manufacturers need to turn a profit or they would stop developing new drugs.

Santorum proceeded to lecture the mother and suggest she should be grateful to the drug companies for saving her son’s life. “He’s alive today because drug companies provide care,” Santorum said. “And if they didn’t think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn’t be here.” He also claimed it would “freeze innovation” if pharmaceutical companies were required to offer their drugs at a reasonable price.

Although Santorum has been a vocal opponent of health care reform, his callous reaction is somewhat surprising given that he himself is the father of a daughter with a rare genetic disorder. But if the Colorado mother thought Santorum might be sympathetic to families in similar situations who happen to be less wealthy, she was sadly mistaken.

“If pregnant women should have to get an ultrasound before having an abortion, men should have to undergo additional medical procedures before getting a prescription for erectile dysfunction,” she noted, and introduced an amendment to Vogel’s bill requiring that men “undergo a digital rectal exam” for pills like Viagra:

On Monday Howell expressed her disdain for legislation requiring the ultrasound by proposing an amendment she described as a simple matter of fairness. Her amendment said that before being treated for erectile dysfunction, a man would have to undergo a digital rectal exam and a cardiac stress test.

“We should just have a little gender equity here,” Howell said.

Vogel argued that “erectile dysfunction, in this context, is different from pregnancy,” and the “gender equity” amendment failed in a 21 to 19 vote mostly along party lines. Vogel’s ultrasound bill will receive a final vote today, and is expected to clear the full Senate.

Aware that such measures are a blatant attempt to obstruct and intimidate women from considering their constitutional right to an abortion, Howell pointed out that the ultrasound is also “adding to the cost” and “opening up [women] to emotional blackmail.”

On Monday, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts again urged state lawmakers to address rising health care costs in his annual state of the state address. Patrick first introduced a bill, “An Act Improving the Quality of Health Care and Controlling Costs by Reforming Health Systems and Payments,” in February 2011 in an effort to achieve comprehensive delivery system and payment reform.

Patrick’s proposal calls for replacing the current fee-for-service payment system, which creates incentives for providers to deliver more services – even unnecessary care, with a global payment system, which encourages more coordinated patient care and rewards providers for better patient health. It aims to “significantly reduce” fee-for-service payments by the end of 2015 and, as Patrick explained, “stop paying for the amount of care, and start paying for the quality of care.”

The Massachusetts bill encourages greater price transparency, consumer protections against rate increases, and medical malpractice reform to reduce the costs of defensive medicine. The legislation creates incentives for providers to better coordinate patient care and lower costs through Accountable Care Organizations (ACO). Such arrangements have already improved care for more than 100,000 Blue Shield of California patients in California and San Francisco, where better coordination among health care providers has flattened premium increases, lowered hospital readmissions by more than 20 percent, and saved $20 million in 2011.

Numerous hospitals, physician groups and insurers across the nation are adopting the ACO model in hopes of duplicating this success. For instance, Massachusetts is already home to nine ACO entities and 32 health care organizations are participating in HHS’ Pioneer ACO initiative to improve care and lower costs for Medicare patients.

Health reform in Massachusetts was wildly successful in expanding coverage to more than 98 percent of the population and now lawmakers must tackle their next big challenge: cost control.

The comparison immediately put Romney on the defense, who claimed, “I didn’t say I’m in favor of top- down government-run health care,” and explained that he expanded access to “private insurance” and allowed people to “choose any plan” within a state-run exchange. “There’s no government plan,” he added. “And if you don’t want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill, because under federal law if someone doesn’t have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. So we said, no more, no more free riders.”

Romney’s description of his plan sounded so much like Obama’s rational for the federal health care law that ThinkProgress has compiled a video comparing how both politicians describe their reforms. Watch it:

Indeed, Romneycare and Obamacare share more than a dozen common provisions, for a full comparison, click here.

The woman — Lynn Frazier — said she found herself “unemployed for the first time in 10 years and unable to afford health benefits.” Under the Affordable Care Act, Frazier may qualify for temporary insurance in the state’s high-risk pool, which already provides coverage for 3,285 Floridians who can’t find affordable coverage elsewhere. In two years, she’ll be able to pick out a health policy through the state’s Exchange. All private insurers will offer a comprehensive basic set of benefits and allow consumers like Frazier to compare and contrast different plans to find the coverage that works best for them and their family. Insurers won’t be able to deny insurance based on past illness or rescind coverage unexpectedly, as they often do in today’s health market, and Frazier will pay a “community” rate and may even qualify for tax credits to help her afford her premiums and out of pocket cost-sharing expenses.

The Republican candidates pledged to undo these benefits and instead encouraged her to find coverage “as an individual” — on her own — with the help of a government tax deduction:

– RON PAUL: And you should have an opportunity — medical care insurance should be given to you as an individual, so if you’re employed or not employed, you have — you just take care of that and you keep it up.

– NEWT GINGRICH: She ought to get the same tax break whether she buys personally or whether she buys through a economy. She should also be able to buy into an association so that she’s buying with lots of other people so it’s not single insurance, which is the most expensive kind.

– MITT ROMNEY: What we should do is allow individuals to own their own insurance and have the same tax treatment as companies get. You do that and people like this young woman would be able to own her insurance. The rates would be substantial lower for her buying it individually than if she had to buy it individually today.

– RICK SANTORUM: All three of these folks sound great and I agree with them. I would just add that health savings account, which I introduced 20 years ago with John Kasich, is really the fundamental reform of getting consumers back involved in the health care system.

Watch the exchange:

In reality, sending off Americans to face health care insurers on their own without first reforming the individual health care market — so that companies can no longer deny coverage due to pre-existing conditions, rescind insurance, or charge sicker and older people substantially more — is an inadequate solution that will do little to lower the number of uninsured or reduce health care costs.

Since insurers are hoping to attract the most profitable beneficiaries, individual plans offer “coverage so riddled with loopholes, limits, exclusions, and gotchas that it won’t come close to covering their expenses if they fall seriously ill.” As a Consumer Reports investigation concluded, individual insurance policies are “more costly than the equivalent job-based coverage, and for those in less-than-perfect health, unaffordable at best and unavailable at worst.” The lack of effective consumer protections in most states also allows insurers to trick consumers by selling plans with “affordable” premiums “whose skimpy coverage can leave people who get very sick with the added burden of ruinous medical debt.”

Thus, if an individual falls ill under the GOP’s proposal, the cost of the medical episode and the inadequate insurance will outweigh any beneficial tax treatment and deplete any health savings account they may have.

Interestingly, the survey also explores why so many — 67 percent — oppose the individual mandate: the most common reasons offered in their own words include that the government shouldn’t be able to force people to do something they don’t want to do (30 percent), that health insurance is too expensive (25 percent), and complaints about the fine for non‐compliance (22 percent):

That top reason sounds an awful lot like a GOP talking point and may say more about the public’s general weariness for larger government than its distaste for this particular provision. But once the requirement kicks in and Americans realize that the law offers a wide array of coverage options without any singular government mandated plan, their trepidation about paying a penalty for going uninsured will likely dissipate.

An earlier Kaiser poll found that people become more supportive of the mandate once they learn more about it. Support substantially grew, for instance, once voters are told that “without the mandate, people might wait until they are seriously ill to obtain coverage, driving up insurance costs for everyone.” Another pro-mandate argument tips the public even more in favor of the provision: “Sixty-one percent of those surveyed support it when told most Americans would still get their coverage through their employers and thus wouldn’t be affected by the mandate.”

PAWLENTY: Newt Gingrich embraced the individual mandate and elements of Obamacare as well. Rick Santorum has embraced other elements of health care reform that are problematic relative to Democrats and Barack Obama. So don’t single Mitt out with respect to your question.

Watch it:

Indeed, all three candidates supported the individual requirement to purchase health insurance coverage and Romney and Gingrich backed exchange-like mechanisms where individuals and small businesses have the advantages of large employers in purchasing coverage. They also embraced regulations that prohibited insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and subsidizing coverage for lower-income Americans. For more on the similarities between Gingrich’s and Romney’s health care proposals and the Affordable Care Act, click here and here.

Yesterday, the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured released their annual report outlining trends in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) eligibility, enrollment, renewal, and cost-sharing policies in all fifty states. As families continue to struggle in a weak economy, Medicaid and CHIP remain essential sources of healthcare coverage for children.

The report demonstrates that the number of uninsured children dropped to 8 percent in 2010 (the lowest uninsured rate for children since the federal government began tracking this statistic in 1987), even as a slow economic recovery meant lower access to employer-based coverage. The ACA requirement for states to maintain eligibility levels and enrollment procedures was essential in Medicaid and CHIP coverage levels remaining stable. States also relied on the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA) to adopt new technologies that streamlined the enrollment process and increased workloads the accompanied higher enrollments. Using the bonuses included in CHIRA, states adopted tools like express lane eligibility, SSA Data Match to verify citizenship, and simplified renewal options.

As Medicaid programs expand coverage, however, communities must find new ways to reach out to eligible people and to deal with the increasing number, and cost, of Medicaid participants. Partnerships between state and community-based organizations have helped Massachusetts achieve a 99.5% coverage rate for eligible children. Bottom-up approaches like recruitment tables at churches, malls, schools, and ads in local ethnic media sources have helped states like Massachusetts push enrollment rates to the highest levels in the nation. Community outreach strategies have been particularly valuable in Massachusetts, precisely because the state has expanded the income eligibility threshold to allow families to enroll in Medicaid even if they do not fall below the federal poverty line ($18,530 per year).

Overall, states have expanded eligibility requirements and enrollment, but more work needs to be done on improving retention and utilization of Medicaid and CHIP services. Income disparities still exist between states when it comes to the threshold for providing Medicaid and CHIP coverage. Seventeen states only authorize Medicaid eligibility if a family of three has an income of $9,265 or below. In contrast, the CHIP programs in states like Massachusetts have a lower threshold for eligibility ($37,060 per year), helping to protect low and moderate income children even during a recession. Beginning in 2014, the Affordable Care Act will address these disparities by harmonizing the income threshold at 138 percent of the federal poverty level. In the future, we expect to see administrative and cultural changes that will strengthen coverage and prepare communities for anticipated reforms.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced in October that it did not believe Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had the discretion necessary bring the program in compliance with the health care law’s sustainability provision, which stipulates that CLASS has to remain solvent for a period of 75 years. But administration officials and many Democrats also oppose repealing the measure outright, arguing that it represents an important first step towards reducing the nation’s long-term care crisis and could eventually be modified into sustainability. Under today’s system, Medicaid has evolved to become the nation’s primary payer for long-term services “and supports, financing nearly half (43 percent) of all spending on long-term care services.” The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that by mid-century 16 percent of anticipated federal revenues will be used to fund care for the baby-boom generation.

The ACA’s long-term care program, CLASS, was designed to minimize beneficiaries’ reliance on Medicaid by encouraging younger Americans to establish a cash benefit in their working years that would be made available to them should they become disabled.

One Democrat voted for repeal this morning on the House Ways and Means Committee, while three supported eliminating the program when it passed the Energy and Commerce Committee in November. “The measure will come to the floor next month, an aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA)” told the Hill.

The National Journal’s Margot Sanger-Katz and Meghan McCarthy have an interesting piece examining how the GOP presidential candidates obtain health insurance coverage, given their support for repealing the Affordable Care Act and pushing individuals and families into the individual market:

– MITT ROMNEY: The Romney campaign refused to say where he gets his health care coverage. But because of the health care reform law he signed as governor of Massachusetts, he is lucky to live in one of the few states with good insurance options for a 64-year-old unemployed man with a wife who has a preexisting health condition: multiple sclerosis.

– RICK SANTORUM: The 53-year-old former senator from Pennsylvania is enrolled in insurance that “is totally private, and not related to his time in Congress,” his spokesman, John Brabender, said in a phone interview. And if Republicans succeed in their stated goal of repealing “Obamacare,” Santorum likely won’t be firing his insurer any time soon, since his daughter suffers from a pre-existing condition.

– NEWT GINGRICH: Gingrich, 68, is enrolled in Medicare and buys his own supplemental insurance from Blue Cross Blue Shield, according to his campaign.

– RON PAUL: Paul, 76, as a member of Congress, gets his insurance coverage from the federal-employee benefit program, his campaign says.

– RICK PERRY: Perry, 61, gets his insurance from the state of Texas, a benefit he can continue to receive for the rest of his life. (According to the Texas Tribune, Perry is already collecting a state pension, even while he earns his salary as governor.)

These men are insured in large-group policies that don’t discriminate against pre-existing conditions and spread the risks and costs of insurance among a pool of healthy and sick applicants who can use the advantages of their size to negotiate better rates with medical providers. (It’s unclear if Santorum actually has an individual policy or a group plan through his campaign or think tank affiliation.)

Their campaign proposals, however, would encourage individual Americans to face down health insurance companies on their own and seek out affordable rates in an unregulated national market where companies can sell policies that don’t comply with state consumer protections and offer little reliability. Insurers have an incentive to enroll the healthiest beneficiaries and avoid or price out older applicants, so that the GOP candidates and many millions of Americans who suffer from pre-existing conditions, would have a hard time finding affordable insurance if they don’t have an alternative offer of employer coverage. In that case, they could (under the Republican proposals) end up uninsured or in a state-based high-risk insurance pool, where the enrollees’ older and sicker risk profile leads to higher premiums and out-of-pocket spending. Those are costs that this particular set of wealthy candidates could surely afford, but many other Americans will struggle with.

GUPTA: Mandate is a seven-letter word, but many people regard it as a four-letter word. Should mandates be a part of reforming health care?

ROMNEY: We’ll you’re not going to put people in jail for not having insurance, of course that’s…

GUPTA: But you could penalize them…

ROMNEY … None is talking about that, but there are various ways to encourage people to get insurance. One is to give everybody a credit — a tax credit that you only get to use if you have insurance.

Watch it:

Romney — who championed the individual requirement in Massachusetts as a way to lower the state’s spending on uncompensated care — didn’t support repealing the ACA’s mandate until the middle of last year and so he appreciates the importance of bringing everyone into the health care system. That’s why what he’s really proposing is a mandate in disguise: using economic incentives to encourage healthier and younger people to purchase insurance before they become sick and shift the costs of their care throughout the health care system. Only under his plan, people who forgo coverage would essentially be penalized by not receiving a tax credit.

It’s the same concept as the Affordable Care Act, only worse. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that eliminating the current mandate structure — which asses a direct penalty on those who don’t purchase insurance — would reduce coverage by 16 million people and even generous tax credits –- which likely go beyond what’s included in the Romney’s plan — would cover only 40 to 50 percent of the uninsured. They would also fail to grow with rising costs and wouldn’t be accompanies by the regulatory protections of the ACA, which allow the millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions to find affordable coverage. But this at least demonstrates that Romney appreciates the importance of a mandate-type approach, no matter how much he’d like to deny it.

First of all, let’s unpack the idea that if individuals have their own insurance, the “insurance company will have an incentive to keep [them] healthy”. That’s totally backwards. The idea that people might fire their insurance companies is exactly why they don’t have an incentive to keep you healthy. Insurance companies preferentially cover healthy people, and they want those who are ill to leave, or, better yet, not enroll in the first place. Captive populations, like those in the VA, or maybe plans with long-term contracts through big employers might have the right incentive, but the types of plans Gov. Romney seems to have in mind don’t do the very thing he is saying they do. Insurance companies have a vested interest in keeping you healthy when you can’t or won’t leave.

But that’s the least of his problems. The real issue, unfortunately, is that very, very few people have the luxury that Gov. Romney is endorsing. Let’s say that you are self-employed, and lucky enough to have found a company to provide you with health insurance. Then, let’s say you develop cancer. You suddenly find out that your insurance company stinks. So you fire them, right?

Of course not. You’re screwed. Now you have a pre-existing condition. There’s not an insurance company out there that wants to cover you. So you don’t fire them. You scream, and curse, and cry, but you’re stuck. Only healthy people have the luxury of picking and choosing.

The other piece of “incentive to keep [them] healthy” has to do with investing in prevention and increasing access to preventive benefits — the kind of services that many people in high deductible plans tend to skip altogether. In other words, as Jonathan Cohen points out, “deregulating the insurance market would make coverage cheaper for healthy people” as long as they don’t become sick or use too much care, but would also make it “less accessible for sicker people.”

ROMNEY: That’s the system we have in health care, everyone just keeps piling on because it’s free…In some places overseas, they have this idea of co-insurance, where people are responsible for a percent of their bill. Let’s say 10 percent. In Switzerland, you’re responsible for, I think 20 percent of your hospital bill. So, if you’re going to have a knee replacement you shop around to see who is going to have the best record and who is reasonably priced…We’re going to have to bring into health care the dynamics of a consumer market so that people have an incentive to look at the cost.

Watch it:

Conservatives have long claimed that giving Americans more “skin in the game” — that is, increasing their sensitivity to prices — would encourage individuals and families to make more informed health care choices, avoid costly treatments and eventually lower health care costs. But there is very little evidence to suggest that asking people to pay more out of pocket would actually reduce health care costs, particularly since most of the spending is concentrated among the sickest Americans (those who suffer from multiple chronic conditions and cannot choose to forgo care).

As Yale professors Theodore Marmor and Jerry Mashaw pointed out in the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, “if free medical care led to more reckless overuse, countries like Canada and Germany, where patient costs are either zero or minimal, would suffer disproportionate inflation in expenditures or severe access pressures. They don’t.” Indeed, the theory doesn’t even hold up in the American health care system, where individuals with higher cost sharing in the employer based system with higher cost sharing don’t seem to spend less than Medicare enrollees with smaller cost sharing.

He said reducing the size and cost of government would give more people the financial ability to make charitable donations and support the sick and indigent in their communities. “There was a time in the ’50s and early ’60s, people were not lying out in the street not getting medical care. Charities and hospitals stepped up,” he said, pointing to President Lyndon Johnson’s introduction of Medicare and Medicaid as ruining health care and replacing it with “corporate medicine.” “It’s not socialized medicine, but it’s not a whole lot better,” he said.

One man said his daughter is sick and will soon not be covered on her parents’ health insurance. “Will she have to wait in line at a charity hospital?” he asked Paul.

“She’ll have to wait in line under Obamacare, that’s for sure,” he answered, before drifting into a long, twisting answer about how a completely free market-based health care solution would improve the system.

The charity care line is gaining popularity as an alternative to the Affordable Care Act in the GOP presidential primary, as both Newt Gingrich and former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann have suggested that charities should be responsible for providing health care to those who can’t afford it. While the organizations served as important safety net in the era before Medicare and Medicaid, they would have little capacity to address the needs of today’s 50 million uninsured — and would certainly do very little to reduce health care costs or minimize the cost-shifts that result from uncompensated care.

In fact, for any politician to argue that government should outsource the task of keeping Americans healthy to charities is like saying that people should be punished with death if they are unfortunate enough to be poor or are priced out of insurance due to a pre-existing health condition.

MOTHER: The comments I heard you make in New Hampshire, comments that you support insurance companies’ right to refuse to insure people with pre-existing conditions and that you also agreed with higher premiums for people who are sick, well my son graduated college and I pray that he gets a good job. Why is it alright for him to possibly be denied health care insurance or have to possibly pay a fee that he would not be able to afford or for a company not to hire him because he was five years old and he had cancer? …

SANTORUM: Insurance works when people who are higher risk end up having to pay more, as they should. In your case, your son obviously did nothing wrong. Obviously there are a lot of other people that increased their health risk that did do things wrong and as a result, it resulted in higher health care costs.

Watch it:

The woman asked the question in response to remarks Santorum made in Merrimeck, New Hampshire, where he defended insurers for denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and argued that individuals who are sick should pay higher premiums. “I’m okay with that,” Santorum said.

At today’s event, Santorum claimed that the pre-existing conditions clause in the Affordable Care Act — which will prevent insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charging them more for coverage — would increase health care costs because people would wait until they’re sick to purchase coverage and refuse to heed the mandate. But as the Massachusetts health law demonstrated, the mandate will likely encourage younger and healthier people to purchase coverage before they fall ill and help reduce the number of so-called “free riders.” Reform also expands the risk pool so the costs of the sick people are paid for with the premiums of the healthy. Once they fall ill, their costs will be borne by the next generation of healthy beneficiaries.

In total, a dozen BlueCross executives and their wives donated to Santorum, according to the federal data. A review of other GOP candidates’ disclosures did not find similarly sized donations.

The $21,000 in donations from BlueCross executives to Santorum — all given between late June and September — come from the company’s top brass. The donations included $2,500 from the company’s president and chief executive David Pankau and $2,000 from retired CEO and current board chairman Ed Sellers.

The support is not surprising. Santorum advocates for policies that would allow companies to avoid state-based consumer protection laws and sell coverage to the healthiest — and most profitable — beneficiaries, supports high-deductible insurance plans, health savings accounts, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The industry has returned the favor by donating some $3 million dollars to his Congressional campaigns and rewarding him with consultant and lobbying jobs in his post-Congressional career.

While in the Senate, Santorum also “sponsored at least two Senate bills and pushed to amend a mammoth Medicare overhaul” to include the extra spending that benefited “Universal Health Services, a Pennsylvania-based hospital management company.” After leaving Congress, “Santorum joined the board of Universal Health Services, where he collected $395,000 in director’s fees and stock options before resigning last year.”

Asked about the apparent conflict of interest during an appearance on the Laura Ingraham show this morning, Santorum said, “I was on the board of a public company that because of my work on health care.” “I’m very proud of that work, I’m very proud of the company. You know, I have to work!” Listen: