Rush Limbaugh Program - July 13, 2007, Friday, Hour #2

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July 13, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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July 13, 2007, Friday, Hour #2

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	It's time to announce the winner of our eighth iPhone.
	Ladies and gentlemen, today's iPhone winner is Mr. Terry M of Lincoln, Nebraska, listening on KLIN radio.
	Yes, yes.
	Terry receives an eight gig iPhone, gets a check from us to cover two years of service with ATT, a one-year subscription to the Limbaugh Letter, and a one year subscription to Russia's 24 7, plus a hundred dollar gift card from BokaJava.com.
	To register, you can win one too.
	To register, to win the iPhone, all you have to do is go to Rushlimball.com and register for Rush in a hurry.
	This is a free flash email that goes out about an hour, hour and a half after the program, and it's a summary of the program that day, a little heads up for what's happening on the full website later that night.
	And that's it.
	That's all you have to do.
	Nothing more, nothing less.
	Once you sign up and given us your email address, you are registered and eligible.
	Rush will have two more iPhones to give away next week.
	I hope he gives me one.
	Okay.
	We said last hour that we're going to talk about health care.
	And and healthcare is kind of topical right now because we just had this idiot film written by uh which Michael Moore was in, and it's called SICCO.
	And some of the responses uh that people have given, you know, said one person said it should be compulsory viewing for everyone.
	There are people, some advocates of socialized medicine in our country claim that health care is too important to be left to the market, and that's why some politicians in this political campaign are calling for us to adopt healthcare systems uh such as those in Canada and the United Kingdom and other European nations.
	Now the suggestion that we would be better served with more government control, as I'm wont to say, doesn't even smell it doesn't even pass the smell test.
	Now for example, let me ask you, I want somebody to call in and tell me whether this is this is what they want.
	Do we want the government people who ran the troubled Walter Reed Army Medical Center to be in charge of our entire health care system?
	Or would you like the people who deliver our mail also to deliver healthcare services?
	Uh how would you like the people who run the motor vehicles department, the government education system, the foreign intelligence, and other get government agencies to also run our health care system.
	And you kind of say, well, after all, these are these are nonprofit organizations, and these people are not motivated by the greedy profits, and they're truly wonderful, selfless and caring people.
	Well, ladies and gentlemen, for me to deliver my health care services, I choose the profit-driven people to provide my health care services.
	I'm talking about the people with the same kind of motives like those who deliver goods to my supermarket.
	To deliver my those kind of people who deliver my overnight mail, produce my computer and my software programs, produce my car, and produce a host of other things I use.
	Those are the kind of people, people motivated by profits.
	Those are the kind of people I want to deliver my healthcare system.
	Now, look, here's the basic principle here.
	There's no mystery why our greatest complaints, things that Americans complain about the most, are in the area of government-delivered services.
	We complain about schools.
	We complain about our post office, our clinics.
	Complain about the motor vehicles department.
	But we don't complain so much about our supermarkets, our cars, our software programs.
	Why?
	Well, in a market system, there are the ruthless, absolutely ruthless forces of profit, loss, and bankruptcy that make the producers accountable to us.
	In the area of delivery of government delivered services, there's no accountability.
	And for example, take government schools.
	For decades, government schools can go on delivering low quality services, and what's the result?
	Do they go out of business?
	No.
	The people who run them earn higher pay.
	It's nearly impossible to fire incompetence.
	And the taxpayers who foot the bill are given higher tax bills.
	Now, ladies and gentlemen, the problem with our health care system is government intervention.
	And the solution is not more government intervention, but less government intervention.
	Let's talk talk about the various kinds of government intervention that hamstrings or reduces the effectiveness of our health care system.
	One is the tax treatment of health insurance.
	That is premiums are deducted from our pay before taxes.
	And that explains why so many of us are willing to rely on employers to pay for and choose our health insurance.
	And what the result of that is since there's a third party payer, that is, we're not paying for it out of our pockets directly, we have little incentive to shop around and wisely use healthcare services.
	Another government issue that are government intervention at some level that raises our the health care premiums itself is something called guaranteed issue.
	Now, guaranteed issue are laws that require insurance companies to sell insurance to anybody who seeks it.
	So why not wait until you're sick before purchasing health insurance?
	Now, guaranteed issue laws make as much sense as leaving your house uninsured until you have a fire fire and then purchase the insurance to take care of the damage.
	Or like having your car uninsured.
	And then when you have an accident, go buy insurance.
	Now, what do you think that does to insurance costs?
	It raises it for everybody.
	As a result of government price controls.
	Doctors are beginning to refuse to accept Medicaid and Medicare patients.
	That is the in uh the government is saying, well, you can only charge such and such.
	And uh so doctors say, heck, I can't make any money just charging such and such.
	Now, before we buy into this business about nationalized health care, we ought to look at other systems.
	That is the people who are advocating socialized medicine, they're saying, well, we should have something like Canada's, or we should have something like the United Kingdom.
	Well, here's what you need to do, folks.
	You should go to uh the uh I it's on my website, but you can you can actually go to the Fraser Institute, and they annually publish a book called Waiting Your Turn.
	And the and they do it each year.
	And the 2006 edition gives the waiting times.
	And let me ask you, I want somebody call in and say, oh, that'd be wonderful for America.
	The shortest waiting time between a person's referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist.
	The shortest waiting time was for oncology, and that was five weeks.
	The longest waiting time was for orthopedic surgery, and that was 40 weeks, followed by plastic surgery 34 weeks, and neurosurgery 31 weeks.
	In Britain, Britain's Department of Health just recently acknowledged that one in eight patients waited more than a year for surgery.
	Well, what about France?
	France's failed health care system resulted in the deaths of 13,000 Frenchmen during the heat spell of 2003.
	Most of these people died of dehydration.
	But during that calamity, hospitals in France stopped answering the phones.
	And ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.
	Now, do you think that we want to welcome this kind of tragedy into our country?
	Now, by the way, folks, look, I have absolutely no problem with socialism or socialized medicine.
	My only problem is when they want to drag me into it.
	That is, if you want to go be a socialist, do it all by yourself and with people who want to be a socialist with you.
	But just leave others out.
	That's my opinion.
	We'll be back with your calls after this.
	If you go along the borders with the United States and Canada, you go to places like uh Buffalo, Minneapolis, Washington, Seattle, you'll see many pay Canadian patients coming to those hospitals.
	Matter of fact, Cleveland, Ohio, is the Canadian hip replacement center.
	That is because of the long waits in order to get hip replacement, people are just coming to the United States.
	There's uh matter of fact, there's a film, uh, Stuart Browning, he wrote uh dead meat.
	And uh, and you can check it out on free market uh free market cure.com and uh and and you can link through it uh to it through my website.
	Uh but the the tragedy occurring in among many of the people in in Canada.
	Uh so the solution is not more government but less government.
	And let's go more to the market.
	Let me give you another example of how a free market could solve some of our our um our medical problems.
	There are roughly about a hundred thousand Americans who are now on waiting lists for transplanted organs, and roughly 70,000 of them are going to die before an organ becomes available.
	What's the solution?
	To sell organs.
	Let people sell their organs.
	Now people say, oh, that's awful, Williams.
	No, it's not awful.
	It's look, I have a kidney.
	Now, whose kidney is Walter Williams' kidney?
	It's mine.
	And so if I own something, I have the right to sell it.
	Matter of fact, that's the test of whether I own something.
	That is, do I have the right to sell it?
	If I don't have the right to sell it, I don't own it.
	Now, of course, if George Bush or the United States Congress own my kidneys, well then I don't have the right to sell them, but if I own them, I have the right to sell them.
	And if we could sell organs, more organs would become available.
	I guarantee, you know, for example, um, if I ever die, I don't like to say when I die, I like to say if I ever die.
	I can imagine the doctor, I'm laying in there, I'm brain dead, and the doctor asks my lovely daughter, who's 32 years old.
	It says, uh, would you like to donate your father's kidney and liver?
	And I can just imagine my daughter, she loves me dearly.
	She said, Oh, I I want my daddy to be buried just like he came in this world.
	No, you can't have his kidney and and and and liver.
	But suppose the doctor says, Well, I'll give you 50,000.
	You know what she'll say?
	Say, do you want his eyes too?
	And so what that would mean, it would be more kidneys and more livers and more eyes flowing into the supply of those transplanted uh for the organs for transplant.
	And so instead of somebody dying while my kidneys are going into the ground, instead of somebody dying, they would be able to live.
	I mean, it's not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen.
	Markets tend to cure things.
	Now markets are not perfect.
	It's not a utopia.
	We're gonna have to wait until we get to heaven to be in a utopia.
	But the markets are the best thing that we have on earth.
	And what is a market?
	A market represents millions and billions upon billions of independent decision makers engaging in peaceable voluntary exchange in trying to improve their lot.
	That's what markets are.
	Let's go to the phone.
	David and Dayton, Ohio, welcome to the show.
	Hi there, Mr. Wade.
	How are you today?
	Okay.
	I work in health care.
	I just want to call you're talking about it.
	Uh I think that the price controls already in place from the government in the form of uh allowed amounts to pay for things from Medicare and Medicaid are already a perfect example of why we need government control because why we need government control?
	We less.
	We need government control because these prices are out here and they're what they do is by continually reducing the prices that uh physicians, hospitals, outpatient providers can charge, they reduce the amount of service that people want to provide.
	That is absolutely right.
	And here's something that the average American does not know is that say my doctor says uh uh Walter, you need this procedure.
	You you you really need an MRI.
	Um, but I can only I i I only have the uh the ability to give you a CAT scan.
	And so I say to the doctor, well, look, um, okay, so you're gonna get reimbursed, uh, let's say eight hundred dollars for the CAT scan.
	Well, I'll add five hundred dollars to it so that you can get me an MRI.
	What is that called?
	That's that's called uh upcharge.
	Yeah, that's called upcharge, and it's illegal, isn't it?
	Yes.
	That is right.
	And so the doctor would be uh uh tried for Medicaid fraud.
	That's right.
	That's and so this they this would happen uh straight across the board if we had complete government control of our system.
	They'd be telling us what to do.
	Exactly.
	All the all the time.
	That's that's absolutely right.
	And a lot of people, thanks for calling in with that very, very good points.
	A lot of times, people do not realize the kind of controls over our lives, either by uh the government or by third-party players such as the insurance company.
	Matter of fact, I told my physician and my wife's physician some years ago, maybe three, four or five years ago, that and we and we have private insurance, we told him that we do not want our treatment based on reimbursement schedules.
	We want our treatment to be based on best practices, and if we have to reach into our own pockets in a d to pay money in addition to whatever insurance company pays, that's what we want.
	And matter of fact, my doctor is uh Stephen Mark, really great doctor, he's since retired, and so uh yeah, matter of fact, he's retired because he put out of the uh uh, you know, he just got fed up with the uh med medicine uh business.
	But I also gave him another instruction.
	I said, well, the first instruction was we don't want our uh uh medical treatment based by uh reimbursement schedules.
	Then I told him, since I'm a lover of wine, I said, on my last breaths, I want to be served.
	I wrote out a little note uh as part of his instructions, I want to be served uh uh very very nice wine, something like Chateau de Kemp, like a dessert, a going out dessert.
	And I said, I want it to be served to me, even if it had to be served intravenously, and that's what he promised to do.
	By by the way, folks, in Canada, it's easier to get an MRI for your dog than yourself.
	That is, you just walk into a vet and uh and the veterans uh hospital can do an MRI on your dog, you know, just kind of maybe a uh a couple hours, two days notice uh but for you you might be waiting a number of weeks.
	Uh I think at one time uh uh a pap smear, in order for a woman to be able to get a a pap smear, it was something like sixteen weeks, fifteen weeks, I forget the exact number, but all these all this data is in the uh waiting your turn put out by the van uh by the uh Fraser Institute in Vancouver, uh British Columbia.
	Let's go to Chicago and welcome Tim to the show.
	Welcome, Tim.
	Hi, Walter, you're the best.
	Oh well thank you.
	Yes, sir.
	It's a pleasure listening to you.
	Um I just wanted to reinforce what you were saying by making a point about cosmetic surgery and and that part of the medical system and the fact that people usually pay for a lot of that, if not all of it, out of pocket, and as a result, the quality continues to improve and the costs continue to go down.
	That's right.
	I understand that the prices are falling for plastic surgery.
	Uh you're you're absolutely right.
	Yeah.
	So why why can't the liberals simply see that?
	Well, you know what we need to do.
	We do need some kind of health insurance.
	That is what what people need to be able to do is to be able to buy insurance for catastrophic illness.
	That is some illness that's going to cost you five, ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars.
	You buy insurance for that.
	And matter of fact, insurance premiums for catastrophic uh uh illnesses are relatively cheap.
	Now, where you find the huge cost of uh of insurance is when people want their insurance company to pay the first dollar of what they uh you know of their treatment.
	That is they go in the hospital and something costs them uh a hundred and fifty dollars or two hundred dollars, they want uh that to be covered by the insurance company.
	Now, if we had something like a medical savings plans where people could put away money uh uh, let's say deducted from their paycheck uh uh and put away money that would only be used for medical care, then people would be reaching in their own pockets and then they would ask the doctor how much this is a procedure cost.
	Right now, people go into the doctor, they don't ask them anything about costs.
	Why?
	Because somebody else is paying.
	It's a third party uh payer.
	And you're absolutely right.
	Tim is absolutely right, ladies and gentlemen, that plastic surgery is uh is is not c is not reimbursed and people are shopping around and the prices are falling for it.
	Let's go to Mary in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
	Welcome to the show, Mary.
	Hello, uh pleasure to be on your show today.
	Uh my point is that if if the health care system was turned over to the private invi individual, private contractor, or however you want to put that, that the poor will definitely be forgotten because they won't be able to pay any premiums.
	Well, you know, uh you see, this is one of the things.
	I think you you don't know this, Mary.
	You know, at uh in many cities, before we had so much government intervention, there were general hospitals, doctors uh giving uh medical services uh to poor people, to indigent people for free or very very loot uh uh reduced price.
	It was a voluntary contributions that they're giving.
	Now, we've been a nation since 1787, and there's no history in our country of our having o to step over dying people because they could not get medical treatment.
	Uh that is because uh people got medical treatment.
	Now maybe a poor person did not get the same kind of medical treatment that Walter Williams would get, but a poor person doesn't have the same kind of car Walter Williams has or the same kind of house.
	So there there are differences.
	Uh maybe a person will have to go to clinic, maybe you'll have to uh spend a day in the clinic.
	Maybe you'll have to uh do some kind of work for the hospital in order to be treated.
	But but excuse me, but if a person that has a degenerative hip or needs a hip replacement and they can't pay for it orthopedic surgeon is not gonna do that surgery for free.
	Well if they're going to cater to the people that have the money.
	Well you know lawyers do pro bono services and doctors have done pro bono services as well.
	And that as a matter of fact there's I forget the name of the hospital the the name of the hospital slips my mind but it's in Philadelphia it's a children's hospital where they don't charge anything.
	The doctors volunteer their services and people bring their their children from all over to this particular hospital.
	Children is I have no problem and I live near Pittsburgh and that's exactly what the children's hospital in Pittsburgh does.
	However we're talking about the elderly which our population is getting uh larger all the time and to leave these people in chronic pain because they simply don't have the money well you know why wealthy I I do but you know why that happens you know why that happened because government is involved in it.
	That is actually the reason we're in the situation we are is not because of the government is because of the greed of the medical profession because when Medicare before it had cap the corporations and the greedy doctors were raking it it was and it was going to drain I I am I'm probably not going to convince you on on this but here let me ask you this question.
	Okay.
	Do you want the kind of system in United States that I described in Canada and the and Great Britain where they are um I don't think do you want that?
	I don't think exactly the same system at all.
	Well it it's if if the government's running it if the government's running it but let me ask you a question.
	Where in the world have you seen a system that you're proposing working it wor it worked in the United States for a long time.
	It worked when Medicare when you know the population was there to pay the premium Medicare did not come in until nineteen sixty five.
	Now what's what in the world did we do before nineteen sixty five okay let me give you an example because I do work in the healthcare system.
	Uh I know for example that thirty five years ago a doctor got for a gallbladder operation about a hundred and twenty dollars.
	Today they get three thousand dollars that occurred in that period when Medicare was paying unlimited and they just jacked the rakes up and they of course they'll do that.
	That's where it's all coming but but of course they will do that because government got involved.
	Exactly but poor people were covered.
	Now if we go to the private system as you propose they're not going to be taken care of.
	Okay.
	You know they won't be and I I live in a very poor county the second poorest county in the state.
	Yeah.
	And you know I work with poor people and actually uh I work in physical therapy and we have not raised our rates since the entire time in six years that I've worked there because the companies or insurance companies won't reimburse anymore.
	If we want to charge a hundred and fifty dollars it doesn't matter you'll get twenty dollars and we literally have patients that we get ten dollars for an hour of physical therapy.
	Well look look why don't you volunteer your services we do.
	I have a very generous boss we do pro bono care all the time.
	Okay, so that's exactly what I'm talking about.
	You know, one of the folks, and we have to get ready and make some more money, because we're greedy, too.
	But one of the effects of government programs is that it enables people to discharge their responsibilities.
	To say, look, why should I, matter of fact, here's what I do.
	For example, I get appeals many times at my school to give to the United Way, and I tell them, no, you go down to the...
	IRS and I already gave I'm not gonna give any more to take care of some people.
	And so what it means is that i if I did not have to if the government did not take so much money away from me I would be uh more generous than I currently am I'm still very generous in fact uh uh you know uh even though the government still takes money from us.
	We'll be back with your calls after this and before we get back to phones here is a immigration update and uh here's here's a title of it.
	It happened Fredericksburg uh Virginia It says a woman stopped out to buy a newspaper Thursday to return home to find her toilet bedroom, I mean her toilet door was closed.
	This is an eighty-year-old woman.
	Uh she is wondering.
	And what she said when she opened the door, she uh what she saw when she opened the door, she found a person sitting who had broken into her house sitting on her toilet.
	I guess he has taken care of business.
	And so she asked him, how long are you going to be here?
	Among other things.
	And when the man responded in Spanish, which she did not understand, uh, she told him she was calling the police.
	The man is described as a Hispanic male in his late twenties, and he's wearing a sleeveless black shirt.
	And so, ladies and gentlemen, if you see this person, uh uh turn him in.
	Uh that's our immigration update.
	But let's go back to the phones.
	Let's go to uh by the way, that last caller, uh yeah, we were t we were talking about the the health care, blah, blah, blah, and prices.
	Look at some examples.
	When the government stepped back in its regulation of airlines and eliminated the civil area seren uh aeronautics board, what happened to airline prices?
	They fell.
	When the government stopped uh actually uh abolished the Interstate Commerce Commission, what happened to prices in terms of delivering goods across our country?
	They fell.
	Now, I'm sure that if you get government out of medicine, not only is the quality going to go up, but the prices are also going to fall.
	Okay.
	Let's go to the phones.
	Uh Tony from Erie, Pennsylvania, welcome to the show, Tony.
	Hey, how are you doing, Walter?
	Okay.
	Hey, uh, can you imagine the the bureaucracy that would be opened up with with uh socialized medicine in this country and uh and you'd be opening up to potential fraud.
	I mean, look at look at the welfare system right now.
	How much fraud is in the welfare system.
	And by the way, the welfare system is another form of socialized medicine.
	Oh, well, yeah, and particularly Medicaid.
	And and by the way, a lot of people I forgot to mention is when I was talking about the failed VA.
	Remember the story about the VA hospital, the Walter Reed Hospital, how our veterans were being mistreated uh there.
	Well, uh people are kind of saying, well, uh uh uh you know what people are talking about uh socialized medicines, they're saying, well, let the people who run the VA take over uh our entire medical system.
	I find that incredible.
	But the key point, ladies and gentlemen, when politicians go to the VA hospital, they have a VIP suite for politicians.
	Now that's what happens all over the world with these single payer systems that the elite, the political elite, they exempt themselves from what the common man has to put up with.
	And uh which is uh which is understandable if I were elite, I would want to do the same thing.
	Yeah.
	An example I got here is I have a friend that lives up in Canada.
	We're not too far from the Canadian border.
	And uh he needs he needs some he needs a liver transplant and a hip replacement.
	He's been on that waiting list up in Canada for almost ten years, and he was down here recently, and he told me don't ever let them talk you and getting socialized medicine.
	Uh that's right, and I've gotten the same response from Canadians, and they've added if you get socialized medicine in the United States, where are we gonna go?
	That's a good point.
	So at least let's do it for the Canadians if we're not doing it for ourselves.
	Let's go back to the phones, let's go to uh Terry and in Burlington, welcome to show.
	I is uh Iowa.
	Yes, right, Iowa.
	Hi, Terry.
	Hi.
	Um I my point was the increased cost that results from the fixes that uh come from things that uh the unintended consequences uh like mandates.
	My example is mandates.
	Um when politicians come in and try to fix things, uh one of the things they try to do is mandate.
	So they come in and say, okay, everybody is required to cover this.
	So then everybody comes in and gives us um everybody all companies have to let's say nitro fertilization.
	Even though very few people need that kind of coverage or want it, everybody has to have it and that increased cost for every oh you're you're absolutely right uh that is uh uh these mandates uh just kind of uh it the one size fits all mentality it raises the cost of the uh of the of the treatment right of the program uh another uh example I had is uh like Massachusetts right now is going through their uh enforcement of their new law
	and there is an article in the Boston Globe just recently about how now the poor people have a worse deal than they had before because now they have copies to pay.
	Yeah right and and moreover in I believe it's a Massachusetts I think the governor signed a law that everybody has to have health insurance.
	That is if you don't buy health insurance in Massa you're a citizen of Massachusetts you're a criminal telling somebody that they must buy health insurance.
	Right.
	So now the poor people have copayes where before they had free.
	Well not free.
	They paid zero price I was paying for it exactly now they have a worse deal than they had before.
	Oh that's right you you're you're you're absolutely right uh that is people need to ask the question well they need to approach things like this okay we're gonna have a we're gonna have this particular program A then you say well what's what what's what's the effect of that and they say oh what's going to cause C Well what's the effect of that?
	That is, you just can't look at the first effect.
	You have to look at the stream of effects that occur from doing one thing or doing a.
	Politicians never say, well, what then?
	Well, you know why?
	You know why?
	Because if things mess up, who's picking up the tab?
	It's not the politician.
	Right, it's us.
	It is you and I as taxpayers.
	We'll be back with your calls after this.
	Let's welcome Dan from High Springs Florida.
	Welcome to the show Dan.
	Yeah I was uh just wondering do you believe that the rich should get better health care than the poor?
	Uh yeah I mean just like the rich get a better house than the poor a better car than the poor anything yes but see here's one point here's one point that the the free market is pro the common man.
	You know for example here's some examples.
	Who do you think who do you think became richer?
	Ford making Fords for the com making cars for the common man or Rolls Royce that was making cars for the rich.
	It's Ford.
	What record companies make the most money the record companies that produce Michael Jackson records or Pavrati records.
	That is the uh what st what uh um what movies uh sell the uh greatest m where where do you make w the most money in terms of making movies in terms of making almost anything it's by catering to the common man which includes the poor and so I'm saying that the market will always take care of the common man.

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