Posted on 07/29/2009 3:42:24 PM PDT by GOP_Lady
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On Today's Show... |
July 29, 2009
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The Rush Limbaugh Show® Premiere Radio Networks © All Rights Reserved, 2009. Premiere Radio Networks, Inc. 15260 Ventura Blvd. Sherman Oaks, CA 91403
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"Arianna Huffington was a former cosmetics purchaser at department stores. For herself.
I don't mean to stock stores, I mean she depleted stores of cosmetics for herself."
Hilarious: The chipmunks are back again today! Yeah!
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Continually repeat ... It's not about me. I'm the President. |
| It's cupcake time! The recession is over. Let's celebrate! |
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Should the obese be banned, taxed,
targeted or shunned like smokers?
Is this how we treat each other?
Is this freedom from the nanny state?
Do you want to be treated like children?
"No, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not defending obesity.
I'm defending freedom and liberty, the cornerstones of theUnited States."
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"I simply turn on the Golden EIB Microphone and share my honest passions and beliefs with people. And they're free to go elsewhere. They're free to ignore; they're free to believe; they're free to be entertained, I don't care. They're free to do whatever they want. But a lot of people aren't free to smoke cigarettes where they want; they're not free to drink where they want; they're not free to eat the kind of food they want to eat; they're not free to eat trans fats; they're not free to drive certain places. Pretty soon we're going to be told what kind of cars we have to drive. I can't cause that. I can't restrict anybody's freedom. We've elected a guy who can, does, and wants to, all under the guise of saving us. So I appreciate the effort, and I appreciate somewhat losing my temper here. But don't compare me ever to an authoritarian who thinks so little of people that without him they can barely breathe on their own. Don't ever do that." LEARN IT, LOVE IT, LIVE IT! If one cannot understand Rush's words above, then one does not truly understand FREEDOM! |
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, look at this headline, and this is from the state-controlled Associated Press. By the way, hi, folks, even though you know it, Rush Limbaugh here and the most listened to and best radio show out there. I know you're there and you know I'm here so let's just go. "Obama Retools Pitch for Health Care Legislation." Now, what does that mean? Obama retools health care legislation. The subhead from state-controlled AP: "Consumer Protections Among the President's New Conditions -- President Barack Obama is retooling his pitch for legislation overhauling the nation's health care system by emphasizing that any bill he signs will include consumer protections as congressional Democrats struggle to show progress on his top domestic priority. Among conditions that White House aides say Obama will outline later Wednesday: insurers would be required to set annual caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses, to fully cover routine tests to help prevent illness, and to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays the premium in full," squeezing the insurance company. This is not true.
Again, most everything our beloved president is saying about health care is not true. Retool. It's just a not-so-fancy word for switching the lies. You know, health insurance, Obama says health insurance cannot exclude preexisting conditions. Have you heard him say that? And the reason he's saying it is because there are a lot of people who really don't like Obama but one member of the family has one of these preexisting conditions and they can't get insurance for it, or it's very expensive if they are able to get it. So he's out there telling them don't worry, my plan, you're going to be forced, the insurance company's going to be forced to cover preexisting conditions, except, of course, if you are a seasoned citizen, then your preexisting condition denies you all treatment, such as a pacemaker. So this is what retooling is. He gives with one hand and he takes away with the other. For example, Obama says the Democrats are not cutting Medicare, but the House bill includes $362 billion in Medicare cuts.
There's an NPR poll out today that reports that the Democrats' health care plan, a plurality of 47% opposed, 42% said they were in favor. This is NPR. I'm going to tell you what's going on here and I don't want anybody to get giddy. I don't want you to get all excited here. I'm just giving you a status report as of a snapshot of this point in time. The Democratic Party may be cracking up. I'm not saying it is yet. It's too early to say that. But Obama has put this party's fate at grave risk, as well as he has put this country at great risk, because if Obama gets government-run health care, the so-called Blue Dog Democrats -- and they know this -- are going to pay for it in the next election, many of them will lose. If he does not get government-run health care, then it will be his fault, and that in his party's leadership and it will be properly and rightly viewed as a failure because he made it his top priority and blew it himself on many levels. It does not help this that he's out there -- he's in North Carolina and someplace else today -- with another town meeting or two on this. He's a rookie, he's throwing a little wild pitches.
I want you to hear this. I still can't get over this sound bite from yesterday from the tele-town hall that he did with the AARP -- oh, wait 'til I tell you what we found out about AARP. Folks, the guy that sends out and writes the AARP magazine or the newsletter every year, turns out this guy was married to Andrea Dworkin. Does that name ring a bell? (staff comment) No, Catharine MacKinnon is the wacko out of Michigan who was teaching female law students that all sex is rape, including the sex in marriage. No, Andrea Dworkin, I have to be very, very judicious here. I first heard of Andrea Dworkin when I was in Sacramento and she came into town to do a lecture. Let's just say that, according to the latest demonization group, the group being demonized by Democrats to push health care, the obese, she could be the poster child, spokeswoman. I know this is unkind but, folks, they ran a picture of her in the Sacramento Bee at a restaurant prior to the lecture. It's just a shame. Anyway, she was a man-hating feminist, and this guy that she married is apparently gay. I'll get the story. I've got this whole health care stack. It's just something reminded me of this about what I said the AARP thing, because the magazine that this group sends out that every member gets is outrageously propagandized.
It's like I said yesterday, all this group is is a bunch of uber-ultraleftist radicals. Well, retired union officials, yeah, retired union members and so forth. Anyway, when Obama goes out, this is the kind of stuff that he's doing that is putting his party in peril. I'm not saying that they're cracking up yet but, folks, they're unrestrained, their hubris, their arrogance is breathless to behold. They know that they can't be stopped and so Barney Frank's out there flapping his gums and saying some of the most outrageous things, Maxine Waters is upset. We got that sound bite from Maxine yesterday where the chickens are coming home to roost. Grab that one real quick, would you? I'm not trying to tease you on this Obama bite, you heard it yesterday, but grab Maxine Waters. She's also upset at the Blue Dogs, she's really mad and she's really mad at Rahm Emanuel because Rahm Emanuel is the guy that came up with the strategery to go get the Blue Dogs to run in conservative Republican districts and win to give Pelosi a majority.
WATERS (sped up): That may be difficult for Rahm Emanuel because, don't forget, he recruited most of them. As when he was over in the Congress in the leadership, Rahm Emanuel recruited more conservative members and, based on some of the information that I'm getting, they told him that they could vote the way they wanted to vote, that they would not interfere with what they considered their philosophy about some of these things, so now the chickens have come home to roost.
RUSH: That's what I mean, the party, it may be cracking up. I'm not saying that it is yet, but there have to be Democrats here, more and more of them know what is in store for their party if this passes and some of them know what's in store for their party if it fails. I mean when you run the show, when you assume office with this overwhelming popularity such as Obama did, you own both houses of Congress, and you can't pass his signature piece of legislation because your own party won't go along with it, I'm telling you, it's exciting to watch. I'm not saying get giddy yet. I'm fascinated to watch this. It's also very heartwarming because the country isn't buying this. We have not lost the United States, folks. We have not lost the United States of America. We have not lost it. Now, there's a very sad poll out here. It's a Rasmussen poll. This is heartbreaking. (interruption) I've got the Obama bite coming up. Sit tight. I'm just employing a -- it's improv here. I'm going to get to it before the commercial break. I'm not teasing anybody. I'm not using a time old trick to keep you hanging on. I know you don't leave this show. You're not here for Obama bites; you're here for me, so there's no trick here.
"Nearly one out of two US voters, 49%, now say the nation's best days are in the past. That is a five-point jump from last month and the highest level of pessimism on this question in a year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 38% still say America's best days are in the future, a finding that's held steady since April." This doesn't help them, either. How would you like to be the ruling political party and about half the country says, well, the salad days are gone, all that's ahead is a bag of excrement. And you're thinking about your kids and your grandkids. So this is not at all the way any of this was envisioned. I hate seeing people think of the country this way because these are the people who are going to determine whether our best days are ahead of us or not. But you can understand it. Here you have the economy the way it is, jobs the way they are and so forth, people's real lives cannot be counterbalanced by whatever rhetoric that Obama comes up with each day at a town hall meeting. All right, here we go. This is a sound bite from yesterday that if every American, if every doctor just heard this over and over and over again a death blow could be dealt. Here it is.
OBAMA (sped up): We also want to start rewarding doctors for quality, not just the quantity of care that they provide. Instead of rewarding them for how many procedures they perform or how many tests they order, we'll bundle payments so providers aren't paid for every treatment they offer when they chronic -- to a patient with a chronic condition like diabetes, but instead are paid for how are they managing that disease overall.
RUSH: This is just heart stopping. This is a guy with a five-minute career. He served 150 days in the United States Senate. Before that he taught people in Chicago how to agitate. And now he's going to sit in judgment of how well doctors do their work. He's going to sit in judgment of how they are monitored. Do you realize this is a mere 19-second bite? "We're going to reward doctors for quality, not just quantity. Instead of rewarding them for how many procedures they perform or how many tests they order we're going to bundle payments so the providers aren't paid for every treatment they offer." So it's an insult to doctors. Only he and his appointed bureaucrats will be able to sit there and judge how well doctors do, and let me tell you there's only one way they can do that and that's by getting into everybody's health care records. Medical records. That's the only way they will know. He even admitted they don't have enough bureaucrats yet to put in every doctor's office to monitor every treatment and every patient that comes in.
This is just shocking, the hubris. This guy wouldn't know, probably, where to find the Neosporin at a grocery store. This guy probably wouldn't know where the Band-Aids are in his own house. And now he's going to sit in judgment of doctors while he impugns them, he impugns the insurance agencies and so forth. I've always thought that Geraldo Rivera was the grim reaper because you watch Fox and whenever anybody is about to die or has died -- that's how I knew Michael Jackson was toast, when Fox finally put Geraldo on there that day, that's when I knew that Michael Jackson was dead. But now I'm wondering who really is the grim reaper? Is it Obama or is it Geraldo or is it maybe both? One guy arranges an untimely death, the other guy covers it. If this passes, folks, I just want to tell you, if Obamacare passes, Geraldo is going to be covering retirement homes like they were Ground Zero in category five hurricanes.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I'll just tell you, it's a damn good thing for Obama, Dr. Chicago, that the last election was decided on the quantity and not quality of his voters, as all elections always are. Dr. Chicago. I think that works. Dr. Chicago. Not Dr. Obama. Dr. Chicago. And I have a little news here from CNN: "'Detroit Area Jobless Rate Tops 17%' -- Government report shows unemployment continues to rise in the Motor City. California's Riverside area also ranks high." This is CNN. It's by Ben Rooney, CNNMoney.com. He needs to talk to the TV people over at CNN because they say the recession's over, but here's Detroit, 17% unemployment.
END TRANSCRIPT
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Samuel from Canberra, Australia. He's a subscriber at Rush 24/7 listening on the web stream. Sam, it's great to have you on the program. I think you may be the second person, maybe the third from Australia that we've had on the air.
CALLER: Well, it's an honor to talk to you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I'm just calling about the term "bundling." It seems very similar to me to the Medicare bulk billing scheme that we have down here in Australia which has just really turned into a bit of a failure. It's got lots of convoluted paperwork. Basically the way it works, you take your Medicaid card with you to the doctor or wherever you're going, you swap your Medicare card and through some very convoluted government process the doctor then gets paid, but they get paid once every few months in a bulk payment. To make this worse, the payments don't keep up with the cost of living, so, you know, doctors have to do convoluted paperwork, the payments aren't worth it, they only come through every few months and they have all these bureaucrats scrutinizing every transaction so they stopped using it. Most doctors down here will not bulk bill now forcing patients to pay on the spot with cash or credit card or whatever.
RUSH: Well, that's the greatest health care reform we could ever have, people paying for it.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: People paying for it, whoa, a novel idea.
CALLER: The thing is, though, you then take your invoice from a doctor to a government Medicare office and you can stand in line for an hour or so and then they'll fill out more paperwork and give you some of your money back. It's taken us over 30 years to get to this point from when Medicare was introduced.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: People complain about the public health system to no end down here, but yet people are so dependent on it.
RUSH: You know, this is the thing, Samuel. This is just a little microcosm. Wherever in the world, in all of world history, socialism, liberalism has been tried with unchecked power, it has never worked. It's never, ever worked. Somehow, though --
CALLER: Precisely.
RUSH: -- people buy the promise, they buy the good intention idea, they somehow deny their own experiences with this stuff not working. I know it's a lot more complicated than that as to how the left has gotten away with it, but could you say with any knowledge that more and more doctors are refusing to treat Australian Medicare patients?
CALLER: I wouldn't say they're refusing to treat.
RUSH: Well, they're opting out of the Medicare system there, they treat the patients but they're demanding cash on the spot --
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: -- or some other form of payment. That's happening more and more?
CALLER: Yes, it is. It is.
RUSH: And of course that only leaves the people who can't afford to opt out, and they're the ones getting the shaft. I'm glad you called here. A good friend of mine, a man well known to this audience, Professor Hazlett, is in Australia. He's there with his wife and his girls and he's on vacation of sorts, and he sent me the following story last night from Australia's ABC News, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. It is hilarious.
CALLER: That's our version of the State-Run Media.
RUSH: Yeah, of course. Now, let me summarize this before reading it to you. What happened was this. The Wilderness Society went over and were throwing a big party at the Fox studios in Australia. The Wilderness Society is a bunch of environmentalist wackos. They threw a party to celebrate closing off certain natural areas, natural wildlife and just land areas that happened to be land where the aborigines live and do whatever it is they do. So the aborigines, their land was rendered useless by these elite, effete snobs in the environmental movement, and of course the aborigines don't have anywhere near the income or the lifestyle of these Wilderness Society people. The aborigines rented some limousines and crashed the party that the Wilderness Society threw and they had a massive protest, and the Wilderness Society effete snobs were totally caught off guard, they had no clue that this was going to happen. This is funny in multiple dimensions. Here it is. Now, this was I guess your time --
CALLER: Well, it's 2:39 a.m. here, if that helps.
RUSH: Yeah, so it was yesterday morning. It was in yesterday morning's paper. "The Wilderness Society is used to conducting its own protests and street theatre, but the tables were turned last night when a group of Aboriginal activists from Cape York gate-crashed a fundraising party in Sydney. Two giant koalas led a group of Aboriginal people in chains through the entertainment district of Sydney's Fox Studios. The Cape York Aborigines went to Sydney to protest about Queensland's Wild Rivers legislation, which bans development within two kilometres of gazetted rivers. They blame the Wilderness Society for instigating the legislation, which they argue denies them the ability to use their land."
So they showed up, they had these limousines, they had themselves in chains being led by koalas. And, of course, here you have these hoity-toity effete snobs with little their finger sandwiches and their Chablis and their Brie or whatever and they're congratulating themselves with this marvelous environmental advancement, and here come native people who supposedly are the beneficiaries of all of this anti-development just ripping them to shreds. I think it's so hilarious. It is absolutely wonderful. And I had the story later down in the stack but you happened to call so I thought I would take the occasion of your being from Australia to mention this to people.
CALLER: Yeah, well, it's not just the aborigines who dislike the wilderness movement down here and are annoyed with all of their closing off various parks and things and stopping logging. They seem to just completely want to shut down the economy.
RUSH: Well, that's exactly what's happening here. And they're succeeding. They are shutting down the US economy. I mean, even now, Samuel, even now it has been discovered that federal bureaucrats have been told to avoid places like Orlando and Las Vegas when they have to leave Washington for meetings. A casino just filed for bankruptcy in Las Vegas. Obama said the days of getting on your plane and flying to Vegas are over if you're a corporate executive. The hospitality business in this country is suffering greatly, along with many others, 'cause the government says don't go there, and others are afraid to.
CALLER: Hm. Well, one final comment, Rush. I hope that the US government follows Australian's government lead and does not put in cap and trade. I don't know if you've heard of Senator Steve Fielding down here who's opposed to it, but he's part of a growing movement against emission trade scams.
RUSH: Samuel, hang on. I have something on that in the stack. You are a gold mine today, Samuel. Hang on a minute. I didn't make it a priority today, but it's here and it's a trick that Harry Reid has attempted to get card check passed without any debate whatsoever as part of the health care bill.
CALLER: That sounds about right.
RUSH: I've got it here somewhere and I'll share it with you. But this is something they're working on. It would be one of these things where they would put forth the amendment, the legislation, have no debate on it, do it on a Friday afternoon like they did the 300-page amendment to the first cap and trade thing. So the Democrats are going to slither around to get card check done somehow with nobody knowing about it, because that's in trouble, too. Everything in Obama's agenda is in deep trouble. Anyway, Samuel, great to have you as a member of the audience at Rush 24/7. I'm glad that you called. Thanks much.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Exeter, New Hampshire, this is Madeleine. Hi, Madeleine. It's great to have you with us the EIB Network.
CALLER: Oh, thank you for taking my call. I've got tingly feelings going up and down my leg. Well, no, that was somebody else wasn't it?
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I want to say, going back to what you discussed about doctors will be rated according to quality and not quality, what is to keep the doctor from saying, "Well, I want my ratings to stay up. My job's in jeopardy. My position is in jeopardy. My reputation is in jeopardy. So I'm going to take the patients that have the highest prognosis, the best prognosis as opposed to those who have a lower prognosis."
RUSH: That's a great example because doctors are like anybody else. They're self-preservationists, and they're also Americans. And if they've got a president that's trying to destroy them and their livelihood but they love what they do they'll find ways around it. That's really a great point. So the doctor would refuse to take the bad hard cases. That would be much easier for them to say you didn't do quality work. So I'll just take somebody doesn't need a lot of treatment and take gold stars from Obama and the government will love me and leave me alone.
END TRANSCRIPT
| Read the Background Material... |
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| • ABC.net: Cape York Activists Gatecrash Wilderness Party • Huffington Post: Obama's Doctor: President's Vision For Health Care Bound To Fail |
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi, Terry.
CALLER: Hi. Hey thanks for taking my call. I appreciate what you do every do on the forefront for us.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I was watching with Greta Van Susteren last week, and you said something, and I wondered what your thoughts were on your comment. What you said was that you thought the federal government should subsidize or provide catastrophic health care. I was just kind of surprised that you said that.
RUSH: (sigh) You know, I am frankly sitting here as host of the program stunned. You are the only person on my side of the aisle to call here and be critical of anything in that interview. Everybody else has praised me as though I were Obama and the Democrats, love me. Here's what I meant. I ran by that real fast. There were some things that I just assume, one of the things that I assume. Overall, the broad subject here is health care reform. She asked, "What would you do." Well, the problem with health care is that people are not paying for their own coverage and therefore prices are out of sight, and there's no end in sight to prices increasing. And most medical care, most medical care, the vast majority -- just the kind of stuff that checkups and, you know, you have hangnail, whatever. Let people have their options from the private insurance market to cover just those basics. You know, you go four times a year get a dental checkup have a cavity filled or whatever, pay for that yourself with your own insurance policy. The stuff that scares people to death of losing everything is a major illness or a calamitous accident where tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills are ramped up -- and, you know, you can spend the rest of your life paying for it and there goes your kids' college education. So you have that. On the other side we have the government in the health care business. We want to get the government out of it. We want to limit it. We want to reduce prices. So as just a reform, if the government's going to do anything let it just, you know, provide insurance for the big ticket stuff.
CALLER: But isn't that going to be a huge cost?
RUSH: Oh, it would be much less than having them pay for everything. It would be much better than having this Obama obamanation.
CALLER: I agree with you on that --
RUSH: I know what tripped you up. You can't believe that I, El Rushbo, said government ought to be involved in health care.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Okay. Well, I, El Rushbo, I am realistic. And right now the government is health care, and we're trying to change it. So if we could get rid of 90% of the government's involvement in it, do you realize what a great improvement that would be?
CALLER: Mmm-hmm. Yeah.
RUSH: We've already got a mind-set out there among the American people that somebody else should pay for their health care. That's going to have to change if there's going to be real, meaningful reform.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: But the big ticket stuff, that's a killer. The insurance premiums on that are through the roof, the coverage itself is through the roof. And the fear of having, you know, at age 40 coming down with some kind of disease that's going to require medical care for the rest of your life, that's going to be expensive; or have major, major accident. You know, these are the things in our society people can't afford, and they do have insurance for. That's where I think, go the insurance route there. But my y whole point was, get the government outta everything else.
CALLER: Right. I agree, and I certainly hope that the House does not pass any part of this health care program.
RUSH: Yeah, well, you and me both.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: But as I just said they're going into the committee in about an hour and they're going to start the markup on it. They're going to do their best to get a vote done on this by the end of this week before they leave town.
CALLER: Well, you keep it up, Rush. We're behind you.
RUSH: Thanks, Terri.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: Appreciate that. I'm actually glad she called and I had a chance to explain that. It's one of those times where I mistakenly assumed that everybody would understand the givens that were in my mind, and I didn't take the time to explain all of those things.
END TRANSCRIPT
CALLER: Dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hiding under a tree hoping I won't be seen. I wanted to talk with you about how the government or how Obama is going to do that thing about quality versus quantity.
RUSH: Yeah, and the bundling the payments.
CALLER: Yeah. And I also wanted to say, I'll say it for you, Obama is a liar. There is no such thing as preexisting condition exclusions for life. So, sorry, no better, you can't pull that one off on me.
RUSH: Wait a minute, translate that one for people in the audience. There's no such thing as permanent exclusions for preexisting conditions for life. What does that mean?
CALLER: That is true. Anyone who signs onto a group policy, which is 90% of all insured, sign on under the HIPPA law from '96. The maximum waiting period for a preexisting condition is one year. That one year is reduced by the number of months in the previous calendar year you have coverage. For example, if you work for a company and you have insurance there, you change jobs, go to a different company, every preexisting condition you have is covered with a certificate of credible coverage from your previous insurance company. So Obama can't pull that one on me. I know he's a liar.
RUSH: I have to ask you how you know this.
CALLER: I work in insurance, which is why I'm hiding under a tree behind a car hoping nobody sees me.
RUSH: That's what I would hope you would say. I wanted to make sure that you had credibility to know what it is that you're saying and discussing.
CALLER: Well, sir, I'm a business systems analyst on a claim system, a medical claim system, so I'm very familiar with it.
RUSH: And you are at this very moment making this phone call hiding under the shade of a tree?
CALLER: In the parking lot, yes, sir. (laughing)
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I also wanted to talk about how Obama is going to do this and I can't claim all the credit for this thought. This morning I saw on the news someone talking capitation, and that sounds exactly like what they are going to do. Capitation is where the doctor does not get paid by visits or procedures. Capitation is a primary care physician payment where they pay you per person you treat in a month. So if you have 50 patients, you get paid X-number of dollars for each patient each month.
RUSH: I gotta take commercial but I've got questions about this one.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Can you hang on? Have you got enough time? Can you stay secret and secluded long enough?
CALLER: Will you give me a note for my meeting I'm going to miss?
RUSH: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We rejoin Stacy from a secluded, unknown location in Georgia. She is an expert in the health insurance business. She does not want to divulge her location because her industry and people in it have been demonized. And we were in the middle of a conversation on a decapitation of doctors. I want you to start -- (laughing) -- start again on this. This is about bundling.
CALLER: Yes. Capitation, folks who had HMO plans back in the eighties and early nineties will remember this. Capitation is where a doctor -- you have to sign up with a primary care doctor. Your doctor submits a report that says I have a hundred people assigned to me as my primary care people.
RUSH: Submits that to the HMO?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: Way, way back. So the company, or in the government's case, the government would pay that provider X-amount of dollars, say $10 per patient, per month, regardless of whether he sees them or not.
RUSH: And regardless what it costs him to treat them if they need it?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Will you explain something to me?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: I don't know how that ever survived. What doctor worth his salt would put up with that deal?
CALLER: Well, the thing is we can promote volume using that. I mean if you only have a hundred primary care doctors in a 200,000-person area you get volume so it's Walmart deals for medical doctors.
RUSH: Okay. So this is what Obama is talking about, we're going to change from quantity to quality?
CALLER: But now here's the thing. Capitation also involves how many times a primary care physician has to refer a patient to a specialist and his payments are reduced when he has to do that. So a doctor has --
RUSH: Hey, now, wait, wait. Now, you're a great, great source of information, and I got questions, so pardon my interruptions, but I just want to make sure I heard this right. I understand the capitation and a hundred patients get paid ten bucks whatever it was whether they were seen or not, but if a patient needs to be referred to a specialist for a test or something, based on a diagnoses, then the payment of $10 is reduced?
CALLER: Exactly. And it depends on how they want to do it, if they want to do it as a percentage, as a flatline fee, but that amount of capitation will be reduced.
RUSH: Okay, now, does that incentivize the doctor not to refer people who should be referred?
CALLER: It not only incentivizes that, but it also incentivizes the doctor not to see patients. Because if he brings a patient in and it costs him 50 bucks to do a visit, and he's only get paid $10 for that visit he's losing --
RUSH: But how can he refuse to see them? The patients needs to see the doctor, patient calls, "I'm coming in," the doctor says, "No, screw you?"
CALLER: Well, yeah, I mean they can say, "Well, it's a three-week wait." If you've got the flu it's over. I mean if it's anything other than a serious condition it's gone in three weeks, the things people go to the doctor for, the hangnails, the flus, the colds, it's over by then. And, now, remember, you also in the eighties and nineties had a younger population structure. There weren't as many elderly people with the chronic conditions. You didn't have the diabetes issues that you have today. You didn't have a lot of these things that are building now.
RUSH: Why not?
CALLER: Well, because the population as a whole was younger.
RUSH: Yeah, but type two diabetes, I mean type two diabetes can happen when you're 25.
CALLER: Well, it can but it's more common the older you get. The same thing with arthritis, the same thing with cardiac problems, the same thing with all these type of illnesses and conditions that come with getting older are going to necessitate more visits with more procedures. It's just an average. It's statistical.
RUSH: Okay, now, I'm going to tell you why this is so valuable to me, your information is.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I'm very fortunate. I don't use my insurance when I need to go to the doctor and I haven't been to the doctor in, what, two years. I just don't go for a flu, for the cold. The last time I went to the doctor was when I held out, I had some intestinal thing and I held out for three weeks. I just don't go. I don't like it, I'm not paranoid, I'm not a hypochondriac, I just don't go. Now, people say, "You're getting older, you need to get checkups anyway, do these colonoscopies, the prostate," I got that handled. But the story you're telling me, my first question is, what doctor would put up with this?
CALLER: Well, like I said, it was the Walmart model until the population demographics changed and the procedures. Remember in the eighties, we didn't have the blood tests, the MRIs, the CAT scans, all these things that we do now.
RUSH: I have heard doctors complain, because of sports stars getting MRIs 25 times a season, more and more people come in with a sprained knee and want an MRI.
CALLER: About what you said on Greta's show, too, about the major medical --
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: -- about catastrophic. The HSAs with the high deductible health plan is an attempt to get back to that. The federal government and state governments have basically outlawed catastrophic coverage. The HSA with the high deductible health plan is an attempt to get around those rules --
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: -- but the patient still pays --
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: -- for the doctor's visits --
RUSH: HSA is a health savings account --
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: -- for those of you in Rio Linda.
CALLER: Right. We would love to sell catastrophic. We would love to do these things, but we can't. The law won't allow us to do that. So the quality part will be how many times does the doctor send a patient to a specialist or how many times does patient end up in the ER with some condition and he will be penalized based on those counts. And because all of your medical records are now in Washington, DC, they can track this with precision accuracy.
RUSH: Yeah. By the way, am I also right when I postulate that for Obama to judge doctors' work on a qualitative basis, quality basis rather than quantity, somebody in Washington is going to have access to everybody's medical records to find out how the patient is being dealt with and treated, right?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely. That's the first step in digitizing, that's why they want to digitize everyone's records.
RUSH: All right. Now, the next question may be a toughie but given all that you've seen and all that you do because it's your business, if you were in charge of fixing all of this, do you have a blueprint, just a basic blueprint without getting into all kinds of details, what would you do to fix this?
CALLER: The first thing I'd do is scrap mandates, both federal, state, and, local. Allow groups to select the health plans that they want and that their people need. I'd do tort reform, of course. But the mandates I think are the biggest thing. You have mandates that cover all kinds of things, you know --
RUSH: All right, explain to people what a mandate is.
CALLER: A mandate is where your state government -- typically it's state but there are federal mandates -- come in and say you must cover mammograms for people 35 and older. Well, that means that no insurer, no group who is self-insured that uses an insurance company for claims processing, they must cover that procedure, under those guidelines, so everybody has to pay for it. You could be a construction company hiring a hundred guys, not one of them needs a mammogram but you still have to pay for that coverage.
RUSH: That's almost enough for a construction guy to go get an addadictomy operation.
CALLER: Well, if he's a guy he doesn't need one right? (laughing)
RUSH: Well, that's true, it's the other way around.
CALLER: So the takadickoffamy, maybe, but -- (laughing)
RUSH: Yeah, we have a different name for it, but yours works. So the Obama plan's got federal mandates all over the place and --
CALLER: Oh, he does.
RUSH: -- and they're largely political.
CALLER: Oh, absolutely. I guarantee you you will see sexual orientation drug therapy and surgical procedures covered. I was shocked, I read House bill 676 before I finally just decided to either blow my brains out or go back to work and they're covering chiro, they're covering podiatry, they're covering all kinds of stuff we don't cover because it's not AMA approved, I mean all these things, you're looking at it going, "How in the world are they going to cover all of that?"
RUSH: This is a ball game. Once they get this they are going to be able to regulate every aspect of everybody's life.
CALLER: Oh, you know, and this nonsense he talks about, oh, well, you know, your insurance company is getting between and you your doctor? Bull crap. Because I tell you now if your insurance company says you don't need an MRI for that sprained ankle, you know, wait a month if it's still bad we'll talk, you can still make your own appointment, go down there and pay for it yourself. When Obama's stuff comes through you won't have that option. You won't have the option to say, well, I think I need it anyway so I'm going to pay it. Furthermore, insurance companies, the last thing we want to do is cut your claim. We want it to pass through our system without a human being ever looking at it, and pay as it should. That's what we want.
RUSH: Don't be offended here, Stacy, but something you just said just rolled right off of your lips, but, man, a red flag went up and I think it's one of the big problems that we have. If I need an MRI or think I do, I want the doctor to tell me I don't, not an insurance company. But, see --
CALLER: Well, sure.
RUSH: -- since most people can't pay for one of those themselves they are prisoners to a system that is dysfunctional.
CALLER: But that's where the doctor has to have a say, he has to say, "Look, you've got a sprained ankle. Let's get it on crutches, let's do ice treatment, and if in a month it's still bothering you we'll look at an MRI."
RUSH: But your example was the insurance company says you don't need it, you don't get it. Then you gotta wait a little while. The doctor weighs in second, not first.
CALLER: No, no, no, no, no, no. If the doctor puts a diagnosis down on a pretreatment estimate or on a referral or on a authorization that says this person has a history of osteoporosis, this person has had a week of swelling, and all of this, that will actually be authorized because there's a medical reason behind it. If you're a healthy 25-year-old, you come in with a sprained ankle and you tell the doctor you want it now, he has to get the auth, he's not going to be able to sell it, and he knows better unless you have a reason for doing that test. So we're not crazy. We know what conditions require what kind of treatments.
RUSH: Well, I know, so does Obama. He says we're going to do what works.
CALLER: Well, you know what, if Obama was my doctor, I'd just go on ahead and shoot myself before I went to the doctor.
RUSH: Dr. Chicago. Okay, let me summarize, let me see if I can summarize for myself and the audience what I've learned from you.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: The bundling is that doctors are paid per patient whether they're seen or not, flat fee, the charges can be based on age, gender, whatever, but it's a fixed fee at a fixed time. Now, the question I have is, apart from the denial of services to patients and the long delays, you know, like you just said, the flu, don't see the patient for three weeks, flu will be better, it's a built-in cost cutter, how do you force doctors to live under these conditions --
CALLER: Well, that's what you don't do.
RUSH: -- unless in the end they have to become quasi-employees of the government? It sounds like they already are. But how do you force them to do this?
CALLER: Well, that's the thing. I already know providers who are saying they will not accept the public plan. I mean today a Medicare patient, a traditional Medicare, not Med Advantage, a Medicare patient is an automatic six-month wait for an appointment. They won't take the public plan at all. If they are forced to, they have told me personally they will see six patients per doctor per day and that's it because it's not worth it to them.
RUSH: Exactly. I'll tell you where this is going to lead. There's only one place it can lead. Single payer government control of both patients and providers.
CALLER: That's exactly right.
RUSH: That's the only place this can end up.
CALLER: And the doctors will have no choice.
RUSH: They will then have no choice. The only choice they'll have is to not become doctors.
CALLER: Exactly right. And we'll be doing what England is doing now and bringing doctors in from China and India and foreign countries that we hope they have a good medical education.
RUSH: Don't shoot yourself, Stacy. You're too valuable.
CALLER: Well, thank you.
RUSH: All right. Thanks much. I have to run. You can now come out of hiding.
CALLER: Okay, bye-bye.
RUSH: Thanks very much. That's incredible. It's amazing. I'm sure a lot of you already knew that because you have to go through this garbage to access the health care system. But that's Stacy from parts unknown in Georgia.
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RUSH: Folks, I don't want you to misunderstand when I asked her why should the insurance company be the first to sit and decide as to what kind of treatment is covered. Sometimes when the insurance company says no, they're right. See, this is the problem. I mean, how can any business function...? You have to think of it this way. How can any business function if the paying party -- in this case the insurance company -- has no say on whether it pays or not? And, see, that is the problem with third-party payer systems. An employee generally receives insurance through their employer; they pay little attention to the cost of the policy.
At the user end, the employee as a patient believed that whatever treatment or drug or procedure is desired should be paid for because that's where we are attitudinally. No questions asked! This is part of the problem. You know, the patients have their role here, too. Now, the American people have been led to believe that they're entitled to all this, for nothing, because health care is a right. And you have people like Obama now promising them, "That's what's going to be in my plan! A couple of rich people, a couple millionaires are going to pay for it." Now, the answer here is not more government. The answer -- as I have maintained from the outset of this because I am a capitalist, I understand markets. The answer is direct ownership of policies by patients. The answer is more patients paying for either their coverage or their treatment. That is the answer.
That's why -- and Stacy talked about it -- health savings accounts are so crucial, and they are dead and buried in both the House and the Senate bill. More direct ownership: You buy your own insurance policy. That was my whole point with the catastrophic stuff. You know, you buy your own insurance coverage, whatever you want. But did you also hear her say they can't sell policies they'd like to sell? She's an in insurance agent! State law right now prevents companies from selling policies to patients that the patients would like to buy and that they would like to sell. Now, that's a huge problem here. You cannot have any system of anything -- health care, whatever, you cannot have any system -- that is based solely on demand and have no rational restraints on it. You just can't! Nowhere else in the private sector do we have that: Whatever you want, you get regardless of cost? Or that's what you think you're getting? It doesn't work, it can't work, and that's why this is such a mess in the first place.
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"Because if you want anything meaningful here you're going to go along with your leadership on whatever it is, and if you don't we're going to find a candidate to oppose you the next election in your district, somebody we can trust." So miraculously (ahem) there has been a deal. The Blue Dogs have announced that they have now gotten sufficient concessions from the leadership and they will go forward. We have here a $1.5 trillion health care bill. The Blue Dog Democrats say that the "savings" that they wanted, which amount to $100 billion, that's good enough for them. So they have agreed now. There is a deal. There's a silver lining in this, though. They're going to mark it up starting in about an hour in the committee, a half hour from now.
They'll start the mark-up, but there will not be a vote until September when all of the members get back. So that still leaves the August recess for these members of Congress to hear about it from their constituents out there. This is the only bright spot I can see in this, because once they vote on it it's going to pass. Once they get the Blue Dogs with them, it'll pass. The Republicans can't stop this.
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RUSH: Now, Obama is out there doing another one of these town hall meetings today. He's in North Carolina. We have some sound bites here. I'm... (sigh) Once again as I look at the transcripts of these sound bites, I'm confronted with the challenge of: "How do I say to people the president of the United States not telling the truth?" Here's sound bite number one.
OBAMA (sped up): I don't know when you've seen the latest cover of Newsweek magazine on the rack at the grocery store, but the cover says, "The Recession is Over."
FOLLOWERS: (silence)
OBAMA (sped up): No, I imagine that you might have found the news a little startling.
FOLLOWERS: (light laughter)
OBAMA (sped up): I know I did. Here's what's true. We have stopped the free-fall. The market's up, and the financial system is no longer on the verge of collapse. We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recession.
RUSH: Oh, we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recession. This is the guy whose number one advisor, David Axelrod, when the market was plummeting, went out and said, "We don't pay attention to the stock market. Stock market's like a tracking poll," and Obama said this, too. "The stock market's like a tracking poll. We can't make policy based on the stock market. It's like you can't make campaign strategery based on the daily tracking poll of how you're doing." Now all of a sudden they want to cite the stock market as evidence the recession "may" be over. But that's a real credible source, Newsweek magazine: "The Recession is Over." CNN: "The recession is over!" Seventeen percent unemployment in Detroit announced today. More job losses are being announced by American businesses and corporations. We also know, ladies and gentlemen, President Obama knows he's in trouble. This next sound bite will illustrate and explain why he's in trouble because we know what he does when he is. He does one of two things when he gets in trouble.
OBAMA (sped up): When my administration came in office we were facing the worse economy of our lives. We were losing an average of 700,000 jobs per month. It was nearly impossible to take out a home loan or an auto loan or a student loan, and loans for small business to buy inventory and make payroll. And economists across the ideological spectrum, conservatives and liberals, were fearing the second coming of a great depression.
RUSH: Okay. So it's bash Bush time! Go back, bash Bush. That's always worked for Obama during the campaign, he thinks it's gonna work. Blame Bush. All of this that you're experiencing -- every dime of it, every ounce of the problem -- is George Bush. The Wall Street Journal has front-page story on Monday: Lending institutions are not lending. Once again, he's not telling the truth. They are not lending. Lending institutions will not make loans to businesses to make payroll! They will make loans if a business wants to expand but there's no expansion going on, not system-wide. So go back to blaming Bush for everything, 'cause the numbers are down. This next one is just... Well, it's as big a stranger to the truth as anything he said.
OBAMA (sped up): Less than one month after taking office we enacted the most sweeping economic recovery package in history. And, by the way, we did so -- we did so without any earmarks or wasteful pork barrel projects, pet projects that we've become accustomed to. Not one was in it! One-third of the entire Recovery Act is for tax relief for you, for families and small businesses. One-third of it. Ninety five percent of you got a tax cut. You may not notice it because it's appearing in your paycheck on a weekly base -- uh, uh, uh, uh -- every time you get a paycheck as opposed to you getting a lump sum. That's money in your pocket to buy cupcakes and other necessities of life.
RUSH: (laughs) He said it's money in your pocket to buy cupcakes. He must have read the story out of Port St. Lucie where the Weight Watchers demonstrator was caught shoplifting cupcakes. (laughing) This whole sound bite, folks... "We enacted the most sweeping economic recovery package in history, no earmarks or wasteful pork barrel projects"? It's all pork! There is no economic expansion in the stimulus package. Yesterday we told you about the two or three billion dollars being spent on toilet refurbishing. We had the story of the state of Oregon yesterday. They're touting all these 3,000 new jobs that they have created with their stimulus money. The jobs last 35 hours! The jobs last one week, and now Obama says his program has been so great and so cool that you can now go out and eat cupcakes! This is a huge change from when he said he misread the economy. Now, it's the end of the recession! It's the beginning of the end and now you can go buy cupcakes. One-third of the retiree act is tax relief? The tax relief is eight to 12 dollars a paycheck, and that ends in January. We also know that barely 6% of the stimulus will be spent this year. None of this is true. So it's bash Bush, lie about the economy, and then lie about his stimulus package. Breathtaking. We have two more. Here's the fourth one.
OBAMA (sped up): I can't help but remember those same critics contributed to a $1.3 trillion deficit that I had when I took office.
FOLLOWERS: (wilds creaming)
OBAMA (sped up): I mean, seriously! I -- I -- I'm now president so I'm responsible for solving it but I -- I do think we should (sic) have a selective memory in terms of spending habits. You hand me a $1.3 trillion bill and then you're complaining six months later because we haven't paid it all back. That was partially a result of two tax cuts that went primarily to the wealthiest few Americans --
RUSH: Oh, wow.
OBAMA (sped up): -- and a Medicare drug program that wasn't paid for! You passed a prescription drug plan and didn't pay for it. Handed the bill to me.
RUSH: I tell you, this is childlike. This is just embarrassing childlike behavior. Crying and moaning and whining about the "cost" of Bush's tax cuts. That's campaign rhetoric, too. We know that their internal polls are bad. We know their internal polls are bad. This is just rehashed campaign rhetoric. The deficit that he inherited is $1.1 trillion. The deficit at the end of this year is going to be over $2 trillion, close to $2 trillion. He's added, or will add by the end of the year, $1 trillion to what he inherited. He has not -- and nobody said, "Pay back that deficit in six months." That's not what anybody said to him! Nobody's complaining because he hasn't paid back that deficit. We're complaining because he's destroying the US economy while growing the US government. Well, if... (interruption) You know, that's a good point. That's a good point. If there is anybody in the world who told Obama, "You better pay back this deficit fast," it's the ChiComs.
The ChiComs are not happy with what Obama has done. They're not happy at all, and they're letting little old Timmy Geithner know about it. Geithner says, "Dooon't worry. We're going to get those deficits down." Geithner is promising that we're facing massive tax increases. I need to slow my brain down here and come up with the appropriate words because this is immature; it is incompetent; it is childish; it is purely, 100% partisan and politics. There's no governance here. There's no acting presidential here. This is just embarrassing. Whining and moaning and making things up about what was demanded of him, and then blaming these tax cuts that spurred economic growth after 9/11. Finally here's the last bite.
OBAMA (sped up): We will stop insurance companies from denying you coverage because of your medical history. Many of you have been denied insurance or heard someone who was denied insurance because they got -- had a preexisting condition. That will no longer be allowed.
FOLLOWERS: (applause)
OBAMA (sped up): With reform.
FOLLOWERS: (applause)
OBAMA (sped up): We won't allow that!
FOLLOWERS: (applause)
OBAMA (sped up): We won't allow that.
RUSH: "We will stop insurance companies from denying you coverage because of your medical history. Many of you have been denied..." You seasoned citizens are going to be denied coverage because of your medical history and your medical future. So bash the insurance companies again. Bash the US private sector, demonize someone. There's your president, folks. Barack Hussein Obama is out acting like a spoiled brat Chicago thug who's not getting his way who has resorted now to campaign rhetoric as though he really hasn't done anything yet other than come in and act as savior and his acts are working. I think -- and I said this a couple weeks ago. I think in the White House that there's a lot of instability.
If you listened to these bites, I think Obama is losing it. The prescription drug act was paid for. The Bush entitlement, it was paid for. Even though it shoulda never been done, but it was paid for. If he opposes it, then eliminate it. If we've got this big boondoggle out there that's not being paid for then eliminate it, right? No. Childish, instability, losing it, blame Bush. And for all of Obama's talk about the Bush deficit, he just pushed through Congress a ten-year plan that will increase the deficit by $10 trillion and maybe twice that. So why did he do that if he opposes deficits, if they're so bad, if they're so rotten? We're dealing here on one level with an utter rank amateur. He is dangerous because of what he believes, what he's trying to do, and the effect he has on a certain percentage of people in this country.
But this is... This is losing it. This is just childish the way he's talking. You could tell he's on defensive. This man doesn't have any experience with being criticized or laughed at. He's led a charmed existence on a pedestal, and all of this magic that he had is falling apart on him. He's no longer at 65% in the approval numbers. He no longer 85% loved and adored. They've had to stop work on the sculpture out there at... Where the hell is it? Out there by... Where all the presidents are carved in the rock. I'm having a mental block. (interruption) Yeah, Mount Rushmore. They had to stop the sculpting. Did I tell you about the dream I had the other night? I woke up. I thought I was in a desert, and I was in a bunch of slaves and I was carving a sphinx with the Obama face on it. I thought I mentioned that.
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RUSH: It was just two weeks ago the liberals were starting to demand another stimulus plan because this one wasn't doing the job. Now today the recession is over. And that stimulus plan is so great, you can now go out and buy cupcakes and one-third of it was tax cuts for you and there isn't any earmarks or pork in it. Oh, it's the greatest thing in the world. Just two weeks ago, Biden was out there saying, "We guessed wrong here. The economy is much worse than we thought." Now all of a sudden it's a success. But don't be puzzled, ladies and gentlemen, the illusion of success has to be maintained until he gets he gets this health care bill through. Have you noticed at the health care town hall meeting we just played these sound bites from, four of the five sound bites are about the economy and the campaign rhetoric that got him elected, bring his numbers back up.
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RUSH: One more thing here about all this health care stuff that we have learned today, what could be done in terms of government policy to expand the use of health savings accounts which are tax-free savings to be used for health care and tax credits that allow taxpayers to keep, say $10,000 a year, to be used to purchase private policies. We have the government giving people $4500 a year to trade in used cars, that's a direct payment, why not give them some monies for their own health savings accounts? A health savings account is very simple. They give you the money, basically returning yours to you in the first place because they don't have any money other than printing it without taxing you. So they give you five, $10,000 a year. You buy the health insurance you want, you get to keep that which you don't spend. It incentivizes shopping, it incentivize cost analysis, and it puts a patient back in charge of the payment system. We're going to give people $4500 a year to trade in their clunkers and go out and buy Obamamobiles. We are giving people direct payments for all kinds of things.
Look at it this way. If we move more toward individual policies, meaning you have your own policy that you buy, where the government lets taxpayers keep more of their money if they purchase their own policies, or put it say in an expanded health savings account, just think of it as a 401(k) for health coverage, then employers would have more money to increase pay, compensation, salaries, and you would have more money to purchase a health plan that's more conducive to your particular situation rather than have to find a group plan that somewhat fits but maybe not all that you want. Now, Obama opposes all of this because he wants to build a massive monument to himself. That is what Washington is all about, monuments, not individual liberty. Obama is building a massive monument to himself with this disaster of a plan. There are so many smart ways to do this, but they don't involve the government, and that won't do, because then they can't regulate your behavior and tax you for it.
Stop and think of this. Let's just go back to the sixties, and let's start with the war on poverty and the Great Society. Every one of these massive government social programs were authored by liberal Democrats. In fact, do you know who invented the whole concept of the HMO, the health maintenance organization? That would be one Senator Ted Kennedy. One of the first things he did back in the sixties, Ted Kennedy devised as a government plan the HMO. Twenty-five years later, 30 years later, there's Ted Kennedy on the floor of the Senate ripping the hell out of HMOs, demonizing HMOs, making them out to be the bad guy. He created them. Now, my point here is virtually every program the liberals create -- I don't want to hear about their great intentions, I want to look at results -- every one of them that they create needs reform. They pass laws. They establish things. And then they come around when they're falling apart and blame whoever is in this plan or program for not making it work when it was devised and put together in a flawed way in the first place.
So every one of these plans, every one of these ideas needs reform and then reform and then reform, and we get candidates saying, "I'm a reformer and we're going to reform this, we're going to reform that." No. You're just going to break it more. Take something that wasn't working all that well or wasn't broken and say we gotta fix it. This is the one group of people that comes along, breaks things when they fix 'em, gets mad at somebody else for supposedly doing the breaking, and now we need to reform. Everything they do. Every plan they put in never works. It never costs what they say it's going to cost. It always needs to be reformed. It's just like Katrina, Congress getting to sit by like spectators like they had nothing to do with the levee repair program in New Orleans? It just gets extremely frustrating. And now we've got this egomaniac building monuments to himself in Washington, DC, which is what this is all this. He's a radical, he's a leftist. I mean he wants to control your life. You are just chump change, you're an idiot. He's the smart guy. He knows what's better for you and for everybody else. It's insulting.
Here's another thing. We've had a homeless problem for who knows how long, and who's been in charge of dealing with it? All it's done is gotten worse and worse and worse.
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RUSH: Mike in Bethesda, Maryland, I'm glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. Obamacare would be such a disaster. I'm a doctor and I wanted to tell you about -- you had a question of what kind of doctors would join HMOs. And they were doctors who couldn't get patients. That's why they were getting someone else to send them to them. So it would be a disaster to continue that and that's why it doesn't happen anymore.
RUSH: Wait, wait. I want to understand this. There are doctors who couldn't get patients for whatever reason because they weren't any good or they just...?
CALLER: Well, initially it was a great way to get patients. I didn't do it but a lot of people did and they found out there was no money in it. You were losing money so all the good docs who could get patients got out. So you were just left with people with patients who weren't very good.
RUSH: So this is why Ted Kennedy began lambasting the HMOs because the quality of care there declined?
CALLER: Correct. And then you have this "bundling," and what the bundling is is let's say the doctor, you do three procedures. So they "bundle" it until you actually only get paid for one so you're doing all these procedures on a patient that might be necessary but they'll only pay for one. So that's the way of them doing the same thing but instead of being an HMO, they're just bundling your payments.
RUSH: Well, I still don't understand why any doctor would do this?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: I can understand if at first you were going to get a whole lot of patients and it's an easy way. You don't have to advertise. Use word-of-mouth. But why is any quality doctor going to put up with this way of earning a living?
CALLER: And most docs are going to be -- that's why most docs are being cash patients or they're doing this new thing where you pay the doc $1500 and they only take maybe 15 patients or whatever it is, and then that's it. They close the door and they're just taking cash.
RUSH: Yeah, I know that is a trend that has developed.
CALLER: And if Obama tries to force (cell garbling).
RUSH: Costs a little more than $1500 to reserve a doctor to get one of those plans. Yeah, I've heard of that happening. That's Mike in Bethesda, Maryland. Mike, thanks much for the call. All this going on... (drumming fingers) Well, maybe they are hearing about this in Congress, just ignoring it. But this is a disaster. It's an utter disaster.
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(playing of homeless update theme song)
Now here's the headline. Keep the song going there, Ed. The headline: "NYC Sending Homeless to Georgia, South Carolina." The story is in the Augusta Georgia Chronicle.
(continued playing of song)
RUSH: They used to just move 'em down to the Bowery. Now they're getting them outta town.
(continued playing of song)
RUSH: Nineteen-fifty-six vocal portrayal here, Clarence "Frogman" Henry. Up next, Clarence "Frogman" Henry as a frog.
(continued playing of song)
RUSH: All right, finale time.
(continued playing of song)
RUSH: From the Augusta Georgia Chronicle: "New York City is buying one-way plane tickets for homeless families to leave the city, and dozens of the families have landed in Georgia and South Carolina. It's part of a Bloomberg administration program to keep the homeless out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. More than 550 families have left the city since 2007. All it takes is for a relative to agree to take them in. Families have been sent to 24 states and five continents. While Puerto Rico is the most popular destination, Georgia is now home to 38 of the families and South Carolina was the final destination for 31 families relocated by the program. Florida has taken in 100 families and 47 more are calling North Carolina home."
Yeah I know the families agreed to take 'em and so forth. I kind of hid that little tidbit from you throughout the -- but think of this. They have a shelter program. New York City has a shelter program. They've got a program to deal with this and they're giving these people one-way tickets out of town. I wonder if they give 'em any cupcakes for the plane flight.
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| Read the Background Material... |
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| • Augusta Georgia Chronicle: NYC Sending Homeless to Georgia, South Carolina |
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RUSH: This is Sarah lurking in parts unknown in Minnesota. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks so much for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, madam.
CALLER: Well, I wanted to tell you that I've been a longtime listener. This is my first time calling any national talk show. But after hearing Barney Frank's comments on Monday I just can't sit back anymore. I really think I've reached my limit.
RUSH: Which comment? Was that where he said it's not his job to help you make money?
CALLER: That's exactly right.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: That comment just really incensed me more than anything I've heard lately because we have noticed... My husband and I own and operate a small business in Minnesota. It's a restaurant. With a recent minimum wage increase we are forced to give a raise to our kitchen employees, most of whom -- all of whom -- make well over 30 to $40,000 a year just in tips alone. And because of that... You know, we're a luxury business. We had a downtown in our business because of the economy. We were force to do close for a couple weeks due to flooding this spring. We reopened before that. We are struggling to keep our head above water and with this new increase that was not necessary, we feel like we are becoming slaves to working in our business.
RUSH: Yes, it was necessary to get Democrat votesssss.
CALLER: Yes, I get that. (chuckles) It's very discourages. We have been in this business for nine years, we have been honored to the employers. We have run our business and treated our employees like family and at this point we are finding ourselves looking for ways to extricate ourselves from the burden of employership.
RUSH: So what are you going to do?
CALLER: I don't know. I'm so upset. You know, we already this year had to can you tell two full time salary positions with benefits equaling over a thousand dollars.
RUSH: You have to understand something. You may not put it in these terms, but once I explain it to you, Sarah, you can understand it. To people like Barney Frank you're a demon. You are a villain. You are raping your workers. You are not fair to them. That's why they have to raise the minimum wage, so that you will pay them something they can live on because you are dastardly! You're an employer. You're a business owner and you take it all for yourself and you don't care about your employees, and this is what Democrats have been telling their voters for years. So the minimum wage comes along to punish you. Barney Frank can say, "We're not here to help you make money," but he's certainly there to help you give it away when it's unwarranted. And, of course, it's always the unintended consequences that always end up bugging everybody.
Now, let me find a story here. And by God, I'm going to do this fat stuff before I get to the end of the program today, but I've got to find -- Ah! It's got to be in this stack. Hang on, folks. Hang on just a second. It's from the Weekly Standard blog, and I got this last night. (sigh) Oh, I didn't print the second page so I can't credit the guy who wrote it. I'm sorry about that. Oh, maybe I did. No, I didn't. This is from the blog at the Weekly Standard. "Remember when it was rumored that some [adult beverages] in New York City were costing as much as $10? Now, of course, cocktails can cost as much as $20 at a trendy District bar. But in this economy, things couldn't possibly get worse, could they? According to the beverage giant Diageo, the answer is yes." I hope I'm pronouncing that right: D-i-a-g-e-o.
Diageo owns Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff, Baileys, Cuervo, Tanquerey, and Captain Morgan. They're a big distiller of adult beverages. Get this: "'The U.S. Senate is considering a proposal that would dramatically raise what they call "lifestyle taxes" to pay for a huge federal health care program. Under this proposal you would be paying more for some of the simple things you enjoy, such as a soft drink and your favorite alcohol beverages. The proposal calls for a staggering increase in federal taxes on alcohol beverages of up to 229 percent! ... Small businesses -- your local wine, grocery, convenience stores and restaurants -- will see sales [plummet]. An estimated 160,000 people in the hospitality industry will lose their jobs -- in an industry that has already lost 540,000 jobs over the past year.
"'The last time the federal government raised taxes on distilled spirits nearly 100,000 people lost their jobs. ... Nearly 60 percent of the price you pay at the store for distilled spirits already goes for federal, state, local taxes and other government fees. Do not let the government add more to an already hefty tax burden." Now, you can go to "AxeTaxesNotJobs.com, which elaborates on the pernicious effects of regressive taxes even further." But these guys think that all they've gotta do is raise taxes on the "lifestyle stuff" and the money is going to keep coming in because you're still going to go out and do your lifestyle stuff. A great example here is the yacht tax, the tax on building them. It was a tax on millionaires and yachts and, of course, people stopped buying yachts and the people that made 'em got laid off.
It's up to a 229% tax increase on distilled spirits and adult beverages -- 229%, folks! (interruption) Mmm-hmm. Well, I know, the cigarettes, alcohol, bootlegging and this sort of stuff. But that's it, the unintended consequences. They never look at these things in a dynamic way. They always look at these things in a very static way despite -- despite! -- all the evidence of human history. Look at... The reason why people are making a mad dash, first-time homebuyers are making a mad dash... I know a guy. I was talking a guy today. His house, he wanted to put it on the market. Didn't do it, didn't do it. He put it on the market five hours and got the price he wanted, because the government is subsidizing up to 10% of the mortgage or $8,000.
There's a tax incentive to buy a house. It's spurring activity! If the Democrats were right about static activity, you could give away eight grand or subsidize $8,000 a purchase and it wouldn't matter to anybody. It wouldn't incentivize anybody to buy. But of course it does. By the same token: if you add $8,000 to the agreed-to price of a house or add 10% to it as a tax, how many people are going to be rushing out to buy houses? It just isn't going to happen. So they're raising taxes on all these lifestyle things, and they do it thinking they're punishing the rich." They are punishing our restaurant owner in Minnesota, Sarah, because she's evil. She's demon. She's a business owner and she uses the employees and she doesn't respect them and she doesn't treat them well! She underpays them. This is a standard operating template that the left uses.
END TRANSCRIPT
| Read the Background Material... |
|
| • Weekly Standard: A Spirited Defense - Victorino Matus • CNNMoney: Taxing the Fat in Your Food |
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, here's that fat stuff, the fat tax. I have two stories on this. The first is from the State-Controlled CNNmoney.com. "Taxing the Fat in Your Food," is your headline. The subhead: "New study argues that a tax on fattening foods could help pay for health reform and curb obesity -- and lower health costs." Well, no, it won't happen. We've cut smoking in half, if not more, and the health care costs have not decreased. And by the way, "preventive lifestyles"? None of this has been shown to reduce costs at all. The government is responsible for how much everything costs in this.
(Reading in New Castrati voice) "Health care costs keep growing fatter in part because Americans are, too. More than 25% of the increase in medical costs between 1987 and 2001 is attributable to obesity and obesity-related conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, according to a new report from the non-partisan Urban Institute." I read this about smoking 20 years ago! "Come 2015, it is estimated that 40% of American adults will be obese, which is more than double the rate 40 years ago. And today, close to 20% of children are obese, up from 4% four decades ago. ... Taking their cue from steep taxes on tobacco, which have helped reduce smoking rates, the health policy experts who wrote the report argue that a tax on fattening foods could not only raise a lot of revenue to pay for health reform but could also help curb obesity and thereby slow the growth in health care costs over time."
Taking their cue from taxes on tobacco? Taxes on tobacco may be raising money for health care, but it hasn't lowered costs at all! Is anybody telling you that our health care costs have gone down anywhere, anything, for any time? "Depending on how it's set up, the authors estimate that a 10% federal tax of fattening foods could raise up to $530 billion over 10 years." No matter who buys them! You know what may happen? It may just be a matter of time. As part of the health care plan, in addition to taxing fatty foods which they're already doing in places like New York and couple other places, you go get your fat percentage taken at your Bam-assigned doctor. Whatever percentage body fat you have, you are taxed on that amount, whatever is above what they say it should be.
So if they say your body fat should be no more than 10%, and your body fat's higher, you pay tax on it. The doctor would be required to report the body fat content above the allowed federal limit to the IRS. Then you go back to the doctor, and if you've lost body fat content, then your tax rate would be lowered. Don't put anything past this bunch. Now, this magazine that is published by Massachusetts General Hospital. It's a long piece, I'm not going to even attempt to read the whole thing to you here, but it's called ProtoMag.com, and it comes from Mass General, and the subject of the article is this: "SHOULD OBESE PEOPLE, LIKE SMOKERS, BE: Barred from indulging in public spaces," should they be "taxed on their habit," should they be "targeted by public health campaigns," should they be "shunned socially?"
Banning the ugly! In this case the "ugly" happen to be fat people. "Once considered the quintessence of cool, lighting up has become a social faux pas, discouraged by withering glances and thank you for not smoking signs. Ashtrays, once a fixture ... have all but disappeared. Manufacturers have been subjected to increased, and ever more successful, investigations and lawsuits ... [P]er capita consumption of cigarettes dropped from 4,345 in 1963 to 1,691 in 2006. And the percentage of U.S. adults who smoke has fallen by more than half since 1965, to a level of around 20%." Yet nobody is saving any money. Nobody. It's not saving anybody any money. Well, the people are not smoking don't have to pay the money but in terms of health care costs it has not helped as we've documented.
So this magazine then asks: "Could a similarly concerted effort by government and health organizations make progress against another kind of epidemic?" Obesity. So this magazine posits the idea that if you look a certain way or weigh a certain weight you're not going to be allowed in a restaurant. There may be signs: Obese Patients Not Allowed Entry." Public parks, public swimming pools: "If you're fat, if you're a slob, you can't come in." Then we'd have the fat police like we have the smoking police. We still have a free society, and people are free to live the lifestyle they want, whatever the impact on themselves -- and "fat" is not illegal. Being obese is not against the law...yet. Exactly right.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We've got some interesting sound bites here on this fat stuff. Let's go to CNN last night, Campbell Brown's show. She spoke to the National Action Against Obesity president MeMe Roth about obesity in America. The skinny versus fat battle is heating up here. Liberals fanning out to blame fat people for everything, they're the new villain -- I told you this. Here's Campbell Brown to MeMe Roth: "Get to the heart of the problem in terms of what you think we ought to do."
ROTH: If you wanted to make a nation fat, we have set our culture up to do exactly that. It's like we're living in a brothel and no one's allowed to have sex. Everywhere you go, there's one temptation after another. I'm surprised there's anyone left in this country who isn't overweight. We need to make good food, real food, produce available, cheap, accessible to everyone. The economics of it are shifting. Big Pharma has made a bundle on obesity. The weight loss industry has made a bundle. Beverage and food have made a bundle. Now we're seeing it. We're picking up the tab, and we're pushing back.
RUSH: These people, they never change. It's none of your damn business, MeMe Roth. It's not costing you anything. She wants cheap, affordable fruits and produce like cheap affordable health care. You want cheap, accessible to everyone. (interruption) I know, but apparently these fat people are being denied healthy foods. The whole thing's bull, Snerdley. This is who these people are. Now, there was another person on this show, Plus magazine, this is large woman, editor-at-large Mia Amber Davis. Brown says, "So Mia, is there to you a sense of blame the victim of scapegoating people who are overweight when you see a study like this?"
DAVIS: Sizism is the last acceptable prejudice. If you see someone who's overweight, automatically they're the reason for America's problems in the health care industry? That's absolutely not true. I know plenty of people who are normal size, who are straight sizes as opposed to plus size who have health issues. I don't know anyone in my circle of friends, in my family, in the millions of women that I reach out to being a plus size advocate that have health issues related to being overweight.
RUSH: Well, this didn't sit well with MeMe.
ROTH: If you're obese, you are unhealthy. Reuters recently reported that only 8% of us don't smoke, drink moderately, eat the fruits and vegetables we're supposed to eat, and exercise regularly. So really, fat or thin, only 8% of us are even trying in this country.
DAVIS: But overweight does not mean unhealthy. I've been off the charts since I was 12 years old, and I'm perfectly healthy.
ROTH: There's a higher incidence of infertility, pregnancy complications --
DAVIS: I don't have those issues.
ROTH: -- low sperm count, and even a higher incidence of birth defects when it comes to obesity. So don't argue me. Argue with Darwin.
RUSH: Well, you can say arrogant or whatever, but this is who these people are. Her statistics are wrong. Only 8% of us don't smoke? Eighty percent of us don't smoke. Drink moderately, eat the fruits and vegetables we're supposed to eat? Get that? We're supposed to eat? So Mia Amber Davis, she starts getting back at her a little here.
DAVIS: I think that that's insulting, actually. I work out four times a week.
ROTH: Which you're supposed to be working out every day.
DAVIS: I'm not here to argue with you. I'm here to say that stop blaming overweight people or obese people for America's problems. It's not our fault. If you are gay, you can play straight. If you are a certain religion, you can play another religion. You can't hide the fact that you're overweight, and nor do we want to. I'm proud of the way I look. I'm proud of my body. I'm proud of all my friends and the hard work that we do to maintain our curves. So stop blaming us for America's health care issues, because I am not a part of that plan.
ROTH: The -- the studies don't back you up, and nine-times-out-of-ten obesity is the result of lifestyle choices.
RUSH: Did you catch what this Roth b-i-itch said at the beginning of the bite? You're supposed to be working out every day? You're supposed to be working out. You're supposed to eat fruits and vegetables, you're supposed to be. And MeMe Roth, who nobody has ever heard of, is now the sole authority on what you ought to be doing. I tried to warn people. This is the SUV all over again. It's just who these people are.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Richland, Washington, Corey great to have you, EIB Network, hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, I just want to make a quick comment on the smoking and the obesity thing.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: It's kind of funny they put the taxes on the cigarettes and all that and drive people away from smoking, well, what happens when most people quit smoking? They start packing on the pounds so I kind of figured that that's one of the leading causes to this gaining of weight over the last several years.
RUSH: You know there may be some legitimacy to this. It is a fact that people who stop smoking still need the oral stimulation, activity and so forth using their hands, using their mouths. And so they do tend to eat more.
CALLER: Yeah, so I was kind of thinking that it just shifts from one cost to the smoking to now they're saying it's the obesity.
RUSH: Right and it's none of their damn business! The one thing they're wrong about is all the so-called costs that we're going to save to reduce this activity these busybody little nannies don't like. I detest these people. I detest them. They are standing in the way of our country's rebound and economic growth. They are parasites.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And, no, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not defending obesity. I'm defending freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty, cornerstones of the United States. It's not your business to tell people you don't know how to live. They're not your responsibility.
END TRANSCRIPT
| Read the Background Material... |
| • Proto: Should Obese People, Like Smokers, Be Shunned Socially? • CNNMoney: Taxing the Fat in Your Food |
Happy Days Are Here Again! The Sky Above Is Clear Again!
Don't believe it for a minute, LOL!
Well, now that Mother Government has gotten a lot of people to quit smoking...they’re gaining weight! The PERFECT time to strike with a “Fat Tax” because everyone knows the tax coffers are slim due to the fact that so many people have quit smoking!
Man, they think we’re stupid, don’t they?
Come on, people someone post it: who has a picture of Dr. Detroit, from the old Dan Akroyd movie?
“...people’s real lives cannot be counterbalanced by whatever rhetoric that Obama comes up with each day at a town hall meeting.”
BUMP!
Was it just me, or did anyone notice the market took a dive today? Keep yappin’ 0bama, LOL! You’re making me a wealthy woman, LOL!
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