Who Is Mad Dog Wingnut Rick Santorum, The Google Candidate, Attacking Now? The Hermanator!

Oh, boy we even get dangerous sociopath Bryan Fischer's point of view! And this was even before Romney campaign operatives leaked to the press-- doing their best to make it appear that it came from Niggerhead-- that Herman Cain is a serial sex predator, preying on the women who depended on his good graces for their families' economic well-being!

Most observers don't think Cain's troubles are likely to do Santorum any good (though it isn't stopping the Santorumites from trying). He can't seem to crack into the top tier-- or even the second tier. His very extreme right Senate record, which accounts for his startling 59-41% loss to Bob Casey in 2006, is too easy to access for anyone to take his candidacy too seriously. That and his advocacy that condoms be outlawed. Santorum also fits into the category of Republican candidate, even more snuggly that most, that stands primarily for the high principle that "if Obama wants it, I don't." Today for example, as part of his "We Can't Wait" initiative, Obama took executive action to reduce prescription drug shortages and combat pharmaceutical price gouging.

President Obama today will sign an Executive Order directing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take action to help further prevent and reduce prescription drug shortages, protect consumers and prevent price gouging. The President’s order directs FDA to broaden reporting of potential shortages of certain prescription drugs and to further expedite regulatory reviews that can help prevent or respond to shortages. Under the President’s order, FDA will also work with to the Department of Justice, which will examine whether potential shortages have led to illegal price gouging or stockpiling of life-saving medications.
 
In addition to signing the Executive Order, the White House announced the President’s support for bipartisan legislation (H.R. 2245 and S. 296) that will build on today’s actions to strengthen the FDA’s ability to prevent prescription drug shortages.
 
A small number of drugs in the U.S. experience a shortage in any given year, but the number of reported prescription drug shortages in the United States nearly tripled between 2005 and 2010. While FDA successfully prevented 137 drug shortages between January 1, 2010 and September 26, 2011, prescription drug shortages continue to threaten the health and safety of the American people. 
 
These shortages could lead to price gouging, which has raised serious concerns. For example, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reforms, when announcing his investigation into so-called gray markets, expressed concerns about a report that a leukemia drug whose typical contract price is about $12 per vial was being sold at $990 per vial-- 80 times higher. A Premier healthcare alliance report released in August estimated that the typical gray market vendor marks up prices by an averaged 650 percent. At the extreme, a drug used to treat high blood pressure that was normally priced at $25.90 was being sold at $1,200 due to a drug shortage. 
 
“The shortage of prescription drugs drives up costs, leaves consumers vulnerable to price gouging and threatens our health and safety,” said President Obama. “This is a problem we can’t wait to fix.  That’s why today, I am directing my administration to take steps to protect consumers from drug shortages, and I’m committed to working with Congress and industry to keep tackling this problem going forward.”
 
Early notification of potential drug shortages can help prevent a shortage from becoming a crisis by allowing hospitals, doctors and manufacturers to take action to ensure medications remain available. Currently, the FDA can only require drug manufacturers to disclose the discontinuation of a critical drug when the drug is available through a single manufacturer. The President’s Executive Order directs the FDA to take additional steps to require drug manufacturers to provide adequate advance notice of manufacturing discontinuances or other actions that could lead to critical shortages. These additional steps to increase early notification will help achieve some of the goals of bipartisan legislation supported by the President that would require all prescription drug shortages to be disclosed to the FDA in advance and give the FDA new authority to enforce these requirements.
 
The Executive Order also requires FDA to expand its current efforts to expedite review of new manufacturing sites, drug suppliers, and manufacturing changes to help prevent shortages. 
 
These actions are just some of the steps the Obama Administration is taking to ensure patients have access to the lifesaving medicines they need. Today, the Obama Administration also:
 
• Sent a letter to drug manufacturers reminding them of their responsibility to report the discontinuation of certain drugs to the FDA. The letter also encourages companies to voluntarily disclose to FDA potential prescription drug shortages in cases where disclosure is not currently required by law.
 
• Increased staffing resources for the FDA’s Drug Shortages Program to address the increased workload that will result from additional early notification of potential shortages by manufacturers.
 
• Released a report from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) that assesses the underlying factors that lead to drug shortages, and an FDA report on their role in monitoring, preventing, and responding to these shortages.

Santorum, who's a big booster of repealing healthcare reform and of using Paul Ryan's proposal to terminate Medicare and Medicaid entirely and replace them with an inadequate voucher system, had a very different approach than Obama's out on the campaign trail in Iowa today. He explained how Ryan’s plan to privatize the Medicare program for future enrollees would “ration” care to seniors by capping the amount of money beneficiaries would have to spend on health care services: "There will be a rationing of care, there has to be," he insisted. "There is a rationing of every economic resource. There is not unlimited amounts of money to spend on anything…[Obama] has put a cap. Now, that’s one way of solving the problem. The other way of solving the problem is to put a cap in a different place and what Paul Ryan suggested and I believe in-- in fact advocated for in 2003 as part of Medicare… which is putting a cap on the amount of money we give you to buy your own insurance. So instead of capping the overall budget and making you wait, thinking you got a card, but the card isn’t going to be worth anything, because you got to wait for it, we’re going to put the cap on the other end-- on you."

Santorum attempted to establish equivalency between the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)-- a 15-member commission that would make recommendations to Congress about lowering Medicare reimbursements if costs increase beyond a certain point-- and Ryan’s plan to “limit the government’s exposure” by giving seniors pre-determined vouchers with which to purchase private coverage. But the differences couldn’t be greater: while health reform will begin to change not just how much providers are paid for their services, but how they’re paid for delivering them, the Ryan plan shifts simply some of the costs borne by the federal government to the individual without improving the system’s efficiency or removing its many redundancies. As a result, the federal “cap” that Ryan imposes will fail to keep up with skyrocketing health care spending and force seniors to pay more for the same package of benefits every year.