NOT EVEN ONE, RICKY?

(h/t Andrew Jones at Raw Story)

Like many conservatives (here for example), Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum has a bad case of epistemic closure:

Rick Santorum Has Tense Exchange on Gay Rights and Health Care in Iowa
Dec 6, 2011 3:39am
Shushannah Walshe
ABC News

SIOUX CENTER, Iowa – Rick Santorum is usually quite amiable on the trail, but Monday evening at a campaign event at a small Christian college in Sioux Center, he had some tense back-and-forth exchanges with one student and another graduate of the college.

The student said he didn’t “think God appreciates the fact that we have 50 to 100,000 uninsured Americans dying due to a lack of healthcare every year,” citing a 2009 study out of Harvard University.

“Dying?” Santorum answered before going back and forth about the validity of the study.

“The answer is not what can we do to prevent deaths because of a lack of health insurance. There’s — I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance,” Santorum said to a crowd of 100.

“People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to,” he said. “And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.