Harvard study not good enough for Rick Santorum, who has his own facts, thank you very much

Rick Santorum had a typically tense exchange with a 23-year-old alumnus in Sioux Center, Iowa at Dordt College, a small Christian college in Sioux City, which you can read about here, but the candidate's vapid arrogance really emerged front and center when a student asked him about health care:

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.

But hey, at least Santorum supporters are good for something as shown by this exchange between an Iowa voter supporting Rick and Newt Gingrich after he claimed food stamps can be used to go to Hawaii.