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Sept. 17, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:09
September 17, 2007, Monday, Hour #2
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I tell you, folks, I am still sitting here, I am still sitting here in stunned disbelief.
For thirteen years.
Hillary care, national socialized medicine, was her plan.
Now, according to Paul Starr in the American Prospect on the Web.
One of the guys on the health care committee that did all the work said it wasn't Hillary's plan, it was Bill's plan.
My friends, that requires the suspension of disbelief.
Not one person on the inside, not one Woodward, not one Bernstein broke the story until now.
Well, if she didn't do the one thing that she was credited with doing, just what did she do?
Well, we know that she ran the defense cases of Paula Jones and uh Willie and uh Monica Lewinsky, and her management of all that brought on the impeachment of her husband.
By telling him he should have settled a Jones case, he should have never testified in that deposition.
He lied under oath, and that's what brought on the and she was the one that orchestrated.
Would somebody tell me what the woman has done?
The Clinton team put it out there today.
This is not Ken Starr's brother, Mr. Sarge.
This is Paul Starr.
This is Big Lib.
It's from the Star family.
Um no, not related to Ken Starr whatsoever.
What did she do?
They put this out there.
Then we got Madeline Oldbright saying she's not a cold fish.
We've got that audio soundbite coming up for crying out loud.
Do you realize what that conjures up?
Of all things that Madeline Orbright could say about a fellow woman, she's not a cold fish.
And that's as far as I'm gonna go.
I went probably went too far when I said she must know Hillary's temperature.
That's going a little deeper than I wanted to go.
So I'm, you know, I this isn't in today.
It comes out today.
When they announced this, well, it was actually three days ago, September 14th.
Uh, is when this appeared on the American Prospects website.
What did she do?
What did she do?
She did.
And she's got the drive-by's eating out of her hand along with Madeline Albright, apparently.
Greetings, my friends, welcome back.
Uh L. Rushbore here on the EIB Network, broadcast excellence, all yours for another two hours, the telephone number.
If uh you'd like to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, rush at eIBNet.com.
We're gonna suspend.
You know, we had a rule during the OJ Simpson trial, no OJ, none of the time.
I'm really dreading here this when I when I was driving in today and I I put on the Fox News channel.
Because I always do that for like a little while just to see if there's been a terrorist incident overnight, uh, because I don't turn on the TV or radio when I get up.
Uh I just get up, get out of there as quick as I can.
I don't dilly-dally around the house.
And so I turn it on and I hear the Fox has sent a couple reporters to Las Vegas.
Oh no, here it goes again, the whole thing.
So I said, we gotta get him out of this just for the sake of the country psyche.
We gotta get him out of this.
We can't have all these interminable trials on television, we can't have any more Judge Edos, can't have any more Larry King sitting in a courtroom shaking hands with everybody.
We can't have this.
A country's got enough going on without having to put up with this.
So I began conjuring up the perfect OJ defense, folks, and I've got it.
It's cultural.
What he did here is cultural.
When you come from an experience because of your race where the cops ain't gonna help you when you got problems, you gotta go do it without the cops.
You just say it's cultural, OJ.
You just had to take matters into your own hands.
You stop and think about this.
You remember the LAPD and Furman and those boys and how they were excoriated.
I can't believe the Las Vegas PD would do this if they didn't have this button down tight as it can be.
And no police department wants to go through what the LAPD went through.
So they must have, they must have something.
We saw the tape of OJ threatening you, you can't steal my blank.
You I can't, well.
Uh it wouldn't surprise me, ladies and gentlemen, if uh uh, I'm not gonna speculate because I don't really know that, so I won't I won't speculate.
But I've given them the defenses cultural, cops won't help you when you're black.
Uh, you gotta do it without them.
I just had no choice.
Stuff had been stolen.
He knew if he went to the cops, they would just laugh at him.
You deserve to have it stolen, they would say.
So he had to go take matters into his own hands.
Uh, thousands of physicians and scientists began meeting in Chicago today to debate ways to fight bacteria resistant to drugs and the effects of global warming on germs.
The American Society of Microbiology meeting is billed as the world's biggest conference on disease-causing microbes.
For the first time at the annual event, the keynote session is going to be on climate change and the impact on human disease at Jim Sleewa, spokesman for the American Society for Microbiology, which is organizing the event.
As global average temperatures increase, we know, for example, a malaria line in mountainous regions will continue to call DDT, you people.
It's called DDT.
If you just simply stop with this Rachel Carson admiration to get DD D pack, you get rid of malaria.
It's real simple, and you're not going to cause bird eggs to get there.
Oh, that was a myth.
We had a question for you, by the way.
You know, they uh there, there's a big I got a huge global warming stack.
One of the stories is the uh the Greenland uh ice shells melting so fast that there might actually someday soon be a northwest passage over water.
And this would be good.
No, no, no.
Hear me on this.
Not saying this is this is this is I'm just a setup for where I'm really going.
That if the ice breaks up up there, that we could actually have a shipping lane through the North Pole.
Uh, and it would cut all kinds of emissions because it would take less energy and less distance for ships to get where they want to go, having to go, you know, around South Africa to Cape Horn, go to Cape Cape of Goodhorn, Cape Panama Canal, all this sort of stuff, you know, the northern passage up there.
All right, so that they're saying this is him.
Now, um of the things that they're saying, that this is the first time they've seen this since 1978.
1978?
For crying out 1978, Newsweek and Time Magazine were prepping covers on global cooling on the coming ice age.
We're go we're gonna go back to 1978 and say this is the first time this has happened.
How the hell do we know?
It's the first time, which led me to thinking about the woolly mammoth.
You've all heard about the woolly mammoth.
Woolly mammoth was minding its own business one day, sitting there eating and chewing its own cud, and a massive freeze descended, freezing these things in step in mid-stride, and when they found the carcasses frozen in the ice, they found freshly eaten uh grass, stomach contents, and they said, what the hell could have cost this?
I mean, you realize this is like a flash freeze.
This would have had to happen in split seconds.
Fine.
We know it happened.
And we know it happened how many years ago?
Before there was coal smokestacks, before there were automobiles.
If it got that cold in a flat, what the hell happened?
Well, certainly mankind didn't cause it.
And I offer this as just more evidence here to debunk this myth that whatever warming's taking place out there, there's no indication it's gonna be bad either.
Uh is man-made.
What a friend.
George W. Bush has in Vicente Fox.
You see what this guy said as quoted in U.S. News and World Report.
Get this.
Now let's set the table, shall we?
Before I tell you what the story says, Vicente Fox recently ousted president of Mexico.
Met with Bush all the time.
Bush bailed him out.
Well, Clinton bailed him out back in the 90s.
Big problems.
Vicente Fox working in consort with the American government to allow the illegal immigration of Mexican citizens.
This country went out of its way to accommodate everything Vicente Fox wanted to do in that area and a lot of others.
And he went and he, you know, had steak and barbecue, fajitas, whatever, at the Crawford uh ranch.
That was uh people were starting to say, What is it?
What's this close relationship the White House has with Vicente Fox?
Well, get this.
At the White House, the president's got to be muttering some friend when he pours over the new autobiography from his old buddy Vicente Fox, former Mexican leader.
That's because Fox really rips into Bush as stubborn and quote, the cockiest guy I've ever met in my life, unquote.
The book is called Revolution of Hope.
It's out next month.
And according to Newsweek, it's a well-written, well researched book about Fox's political career in presidency, which coincided with Bush's.
While he expresses a kinship with Bush, he breaks with the president on the war.
He slams the Republicans' immigration platform.
He blames Bush's stubbornness on Iraq for bad international relations.
He calls Bush's Spanish grade school level and admits he didn't think Bush would ever become president.
I can't honestly say that I ever had seen George W. Bush getting into the White House, he writes.
That all of these people on the world stage or in the in the inside the beltway on the Washington stage actually have drank the Kool-Aid, and they they really do believe that the way to worm themselves into the approving and loving hearts of people around the world is to rip George W. Bush to shreds.
This kind of disloyalty, I don't care if it is the President of Mexico.
This kind of disloyalty just offends my sensibilities to um to know in.
All right, uh, we've got a lot of people waited on hold here, waiting on hold because we haven't taken a call yet, so we'll fix that.
We come back after this timeout.
What is this?
What is this?
I realize, ladies and gentlemen, some of you um, Rush, prove it.
Madel Albright called uh Hillary Rodham Clinton a uh uh cold fish, said she's not a cold fish.
It was a campaign rally in Des Moines on Friday night.
It's just six seconds here, but here it is.
There has been a real attempt to portray her as a cold fish, and she is not.
There you go.
So Matt Albright knows that Hillary Clinton is not a cold fish.
Speaks from a position of uh authority and knowledge.
Um yeah, she was that's right, that's right.
Nataline Albright was the first rollout.
The whole cabinet walked out there.
This, you know, when when Clinton said, I want to say this one time.
I want you to listen to me.
I did not have sex with that with sexual relations of that woman, Miss Lewinsky, not a single time.
Never.
I never told anybody to lie.
So then he rolled a whole cabinet out there.
And Madeline Albright was the one who spoke.
We stand by the president.
We're not a cold fish uh either.
Uh we stand by the president so forth.
Yes, she was the she was a first one good memory, Mr. Snerdley.
All right, to the phones to Dallas.
This is Marilyn.
Welcome, and it's nice to have you as first up today.
Hi, Rush.
It's so good to talk to you.
I'm reading the Greenspan book, and I do find it to be really politically balanced, and uh, he's pretty involved in it with and very seems to be giving details, and I was thinking there cannot be a definitive definitive book of our time without you in it, and sure enough, page 158.
He talks about the fact that that when uh Clinton wanted to put money into Mexico to bail him out, that I think Gingrich uh in the 94 Congress, uh well, Gingrich wanted the 94 Congress to uh approve this.
So he called Greenspan, according to his story here, and asked him if he would call you.
Because they uh he said some of the freshman congressmen actually are calling themselves the Dittohead Caucus.
So Greenspan says he did call you, and he said that Rush listened politely as I laid out my arguments and thanked me for the taking the time.
This surprised me.
I expected Rush Limbaugh to be much more confrontational.
And you were asking if this is true.
Yes.
Uh it is true.
Every word of that's true.
Uh uh in fact, uh the call came was in my uh New York orifice at the time, and the call came from Chairman Greenspan, and he said that uh uh Speaker Gingrich had asked him to call to explain the Mexican bailout uh because they thought that it was an important thing for uh trade and uh they need to keep the Mexican economy afloat.
They didn't they didn't want it to uh default in any way.
Uh and he explained why he was in favor of it, Greenspan.
And uh I can't you know that whenever I hear this, though, that people expect me to be some bombastic confrontational, who the hell do you think you are calling me?
Don't you know I'm busy kind of guy.
I'm stuck.
I'm one of the most polite people that you would ever run into.
If the chairman of Federal Reserve is gonna call me, I'm gonna listen to what he said.
It stuns me.
But really I'm glad he put that nice reference in there.
Uh, but it's exactly what happened.
It uh it did happen.
And it by the way, this is not the first that it's been reported.
Um it leaked out.
Uh and I got I got calls from the media, so I called back to Greenspan's office and said, I don't know if this call was off the record or not.
And uh oh no, no, perfectly fine.
Uh we don't care that uh uh anybody knows about it.
So it got it got reported sometime after.
It wasn't long after, maybe a month or two.
It could have been longer than that.
It did take a while for it to filter out, but uh he didn't have any desire of suppressing it or denying that it took place.
He freely admitted it.
So I I don't think that he thought that there was anything untoward.
I have not heard from him since.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I think it's a good book.
I hope I hope that uh I hope as I read through it that uh that I don't find too much Bush bashing, but I think a lot of it's true.
He said he didn't like all the spending Bush approved, and none of us do.
Well, you know, uh Greenspan is a libertarian Republican.
If that's how he describes himself.
Uh and I don't know if you heard the soundbite in the first hour, but he was asked last night in his profile on 60 Minutes uh what he thought about Hillary Clinton.
I'm sure he's very capable, I'm voting Republican.
Of course the drive bys are leaving that alone.
They're too busy having orgasms today over the fact she's finally presented her health care plan.
We have audio sound bites of that.
Yeah, the criticism of Bush, I think uh from what I've read, uh Greenspan simply says he has please veto some of this.
This is this is irresponsible.
But it's not criticism of Bush on the on the war, like well, th this leak over the weekend about uh Iraq war was for oil.
That was that was purposefully done.
That was the taking this book totally out of context.
Um Greenspan has to be fit to be tied over, because not at all what he said.
Well, you keep up the work against Hillary South Carolina.
You're a best hope.
I appreciate that, Marilyn.
Thanks much.
Great to talk to you.
Andrew in New York City.
You're next.
I appreciate your patience.
Welcome to the program.
Hey, East Penn Bike and Diddles, Rush.
Thank you.
Uh your presumption that uh Greenspan wouldn't read his own book even though it's done by a ghostwriter, I don't I don't really agree with that.
I mean, uh, according to the interview last night, he's uh reading agricultural reports for uh light reading.
Uh yeah, I look at you have to understand here that this whole series of events couple you got to do you d do you understand did I not convey?
If I didn't, it's my fault.
Did I not convey my degree of shock and outrage when I'm at the football game in Lincoln on Saturday night and I fire up during a timeout the Drudge Report on my iPhone, and I see that Greenspan says war was for oil.
I thought, what the hell is that?
Then I see a subhead praises Clinton as hero, rips Bush.
So what the hell is this?
Then I start researching, I find out about his ghost writer.
He says he's gonna write the first draft and a last draft, and I'm thinking, does he even know what's in the book?
That's in the timeline next was I find out he did this interview with Bob Woodward where he says exactly what he said uh in the interview about the book, but it's not what he wrote.
Well, I mean, you're the host, and I'm just a caller, but I mean, the man whenever the man had loud flatulence, the economy rose and fall.
So I I just think he probably would have read the book beforehand.
That's my only point.
Uh well, you know, I I'm not suggesting that Alan Greenspan is Charles Barclay.
But I'll never forget when Barclay's autobiography came out.
There were a bunch of questionable passages in it, and the press said, Charles, what the hell is this?
He says, I was misquoted.
You know, people started scratching their heads.
How do you get misquoted in your autobiography?
He said, Well, that's not what I that's not what I said.
It's not what I wrote.
It's not what I meant to say.
It was just hilarious.
I'm not I'm don't don't don't misunderstand.
I am not impugning uh uh Chairman Greenspan.
Uh in the timeline of events, none of this, none of this made any sense.
I was just sharing with you the thoughts that I had were popping into my fertile little gray cells, and they're always popping.
The neurons in there never stop, even when I'm sleeping.
My brain rebuilds itself, unlike most people's.
That's why I don't remember my dreams.
My brain is too busy doing other things, reminding me of things that I'm thinking about when I'm sleeping.
I just wake up and am smarter.
It just happens.
That's right, folks.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
All right, let's go to the audio sound bites.
This is Hillary Healthcare Announcement Day.
In case you're just joining us, if you if you missed the uh any of the precious broadcast moments prior to right now, the American Prospect, a Lib publication, has a story of a man named Paul Starr, not related to Ken Starr, who was on the Clinton health care team in 1993, and he admits to their admits, I announces today that it was Bill's plan.
Bill put it together.
Bill had nothing.
Hillary had nothing to do with it.
All she did was chair it.
This comes out, well, it was dated the 14th.
It's a web only, uh, this story.
It's not going to get wide distribution in the drive-by media.
Why now?
Why, why?
She for thirteen years, her sole reputation as a smartest woman in the world, a great bureaucrat's been based on the fact that she put the plan together because she's smart, she cares, and she wants the best for everybody.
And today, via the American prospect.
You won't hear this anywhere else in this pro other than this program unless other programs pick up on this.
Now we find out she did nothing but lead the effort, which was botched.
Nevertheless, the drive-by's, ladies and gentlemen, are just ecstatic.
Uh on the Good Morning America program today.
Here's a portion of uh Diane Sawyer and reporter David Wright announcing the Hillary Clinton health care plan.
Today is the day Hillary Clinton, Senator Clinton wades back in on the issue of universal health care.
It is now 13 years after she first made an effort to overhaul health care, and it ended in an uproar.
So what is she offering this time around?
ABC's David Wright is here with more David.
Good morning, Diane.
This is a huge moment for the Clinton campaign healthcare was the issue that propelled Mrs. Clinton onto the national stage as a political figure in her own right.
It's a lie!
She didn't do it.
Now what's going to happen to this Paul Starr guy?
It ended in an uproar.
It ended in a failure.
It ended in total failure.
This is uh but that they're so excited.
Panting away.
Can't wait to find to announce it.
Just so excited.
And this whole lead-in apparently now is bogus.
It's a lie.
Not that they knew at the time.
She didn't do it.
You know, I think I I actually I think I have figured this out.
Just off the spur of the moment here, I think one of the reasons I'm putting this out here is because it did fail.
And since it did fail, let's blame it on Bill.
What the hell?
Let's take her out of the realm of responsibility for failure on this.
And make it sure that her new plan is just hers, and she's making modifications in it.
Here's a portion of uh what she said.
Uh this is at uh Tom Harkin's steak fry uh yesterday in Indianola, Iowa, a portion of what Mrs. Clinton said.
I've been a child advocate for longer than I care to tell you, 35 years.
My first assignment was going door to door in communities trying to figure out why there were more kids registered in a census than there were enrolled in school.
And I knocked On doors, and I went into little apartments, and I talked with people, and I found children in wheelchairs, and I found blind children and deaf children.
They weren't in school.
We were able to change that.
So for me, running for president is a continuation of what my whole life has meant as an activist.
Get out the strativarius.
What are the odds you're going to go into people's houses, find deaf kids, kids in wheelchairs, and they're not going to school and they can't go to see any government to fix it.
These are the kinds of little lies these people tell.
It's just like she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary.
It's just like she wanted to join the Marine.
Yeah, it's exactly right.
She wanted to join the Marines.
There's a book out there called uh Overtreated, Way Too Much Medicine is making us sicker and poorer.
And it is by Shannon Brownley.
And I have this about it from Publishers Weekly.
Contrary to Americans' common belief that in health care, more is more, more spending, drugs and technology means better care.
This lucid report posits that less is actually better.
Medical journalist uh Shannon Brownley acknowledges that state-of-the-art medicine can improve care and save lives, but technology and drugs are misused and overused, she argues, citing a 2003 study of one million Medicare recipients published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which showed that patients in hospitals that spent the most were 2% to 6% more likely to die than patients in hospitals that spent the least.
Additionally, she says, billions per year are spent on unnecessary tests and drugs and on specialists who are rewarded more for some procedures than for more appropriate ones.
The solution, Brownley writes, already exists.
The Veterans Health Administration outperforms the rest of the American health care system on multiple measures of quality.
The main obstacle to replicating this model nationwide, according to the author, is a powerful cartel of organizations from hospitals and drug companies that stand to lose in such a system.
So her point here is, and here on the day that Mrs. Clinton's announced her health care plan, uh, and the days that the drive-bys are having their health care orgasms out there because she did so today.
Uh this this book makes the point that people go to the doctor too much.
They get tests that are not necessary, drugs that are not necessary, and so forth.
You know, I uh I have to tell you something, folks, and I this is I know this is just anecdotal.
But I've I've had to go, let's see, what was it last two December.
Two December's ago, I had I had been to Mexico and and and played golf for a week.
And I came back.
It was right before Thanksgiving, and I guess this was uh the middle of December.
You guys, you guys, Brian, you had to drive me up there to the hospital because I I had these abdominal pains like I could not believe.
So uh drove me up there, and I thought just get it checked out, you know, have something prescribed.
No, you gotta we gotta admit you.
And here came three days of tests.
Even though the first CAT scan showed what the problem was.
It was a little bug in there that I got from Mexico is causing a blockage.
Here came the antibiotic bamboo taken care of.
Three days, all these tests and so forth.
Now, I'm not being critical of the doctors in this case because they were, you know, I'm important person.
Uh they had to go in there, they had to rule out a whole bunch of stuff.
But it wasn't necessary.
They were just being careful.
But it cost, you know, it it it it it cost all kinds of money.
And that was this is one of the reasons why I'm doctor visit averse.
You go to the doctor for anything, and you're looking at a day or two of battery of tests get sent here, got for that scan, this scan, go over there.
My problem's compounded because I can't get an MRI because my cochlear implant requires magnets inside my skull, and that would blow the MRI machine up, and me.
So they have to do, you know, uh other things.
But I tell you, it's all it it struck me that it's it's like a um uh it's almost it's almost like you know, lawyers and their billable hours.
You go in there, okay.
You go down there for this guy to give you the tests, and you've got to go over there.
It's like they've got you.
And once you walk in there, you can't walk out on your own without signing all these forms and so forth.
It is like a it's it's sort of a it's sort of a process.
Anyway, this book uh is is all about the fact that there's way more of this that's than than is necessary after original diagnoses take place.
Uh and so it's interesting that you know Mrs. Clinton is coming out today with a new health care plan, which is promising that you can go anytime anywhere, get whatever you want, it's gonna be paid for, it's only gonna cost 110 billion dollars.
That's one of the biggest ripoffs.
Do you know that existing medical regulations?
I gotta find this.
I've I'm gonna take a break, I'm gonna find it because I don't want to get this uh incorrect by doing it off the top of my head, but just the existing regulations and certain government-run health care programs now require 400 uh million dollars a year.
Or maybe it's billion.
I'll have to double check that.
In the meantime, Billings, Montana.
Greg, welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, God bless your parents, because there's a lot of us out here that uh don't know where we'd be uh if you weren't there, pal.
Well, thank you very much, sir.
I appreciate I uh I read those headlines on drugs this weekend as well, and I had a little bit of a different take uh in reference to uh Greenspan bashing Bush and praising Clinton.
It kind of confirmed a long suspicion that I had about it.
I believe that uh when Clinton or Clinton and Greenspan were in collusion and putting the brakes on the economy in two thousand.
Even after the market crash, they kept on raising interest rates and raising interest rates, and I think that was a whole setup to make him look better.
And I I think it might be a good one.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
How did it make Clinton look better?
Well, you know what, the the economy got blamed on Bush just through through the whole uh press of it all, but I think maybe the brakes got slammed on a little too hard and they didn't know the impact just because of other variables within the economy.
Uh well, that's quite a charge you're making.
Greenspan colluded with Clinton to raise interest rates in order to make the I'm saying that's what my suspicion of of the deal was.
And I and I think it it just seemed like when they're raising interest rates after the market had crashed in uh March of 2000, they kept on raising interest rates all through that summer.
Now, why on earth were they still doing that with the market being dead?
Well, but uh my question to you is, and on behalf of the audience, how does that help Clinton?
How does raising interest rates make the economy look better under Clinton?
When we're already at 2,000, it's his last year in office.
Well, uh because his economy look because the economy was so strong and you wanted to set I believe you were even the one that were possibly even saying this, that wanted to set uh whoever the next successor was that that the economy is all on the air.
Yeah, but that's that's because we found that Clinton was cooking Commerce Department statistics on the health of U.S. businesses.
And he was inflating profitability and so forth by thirty percent in in reports.
I think, as far as Greenspan's concerned, and Bernanke, the current chairman's doing the same thing.
These guys are paranoid about inflation.
I mean, inflation is the one thing that scares the death out of them, and that and they're obviously gonna spend more time on that uh than they are the credit crunch and other things uh that are have a subprime lending scandal uh and so forth.
But we'll see if rates come down this month.
They have another meeting here.
Uh is it this month or is it October?
I think it's this month, but whatever.
Uh the experts predicting rates will come down.
Fed will drop some rate like a half a percent or quarter percent.
Gotta take a break.
Be right back.
The views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right, 98.7% of the time, that means that there is uh almost always a um one point seven percent, there one point three percent margin of error.
Uh uh the that that the the when I'm almost always wrong.
Uh one point three percent of the time, that's incredible.
Nobody can match that figure.
800 two eight two two eight eight two.
Here's the figure I was looking for.
It's a story in the Economist magazine from the uh from June twenty-eighth of this year.
It's from the print edition.
We found it on the web.
And I it it's in the third paragraph here.
But current federal regulations.
Health care regulations, current federal health care regulations cost U.S. consumers almost 400 billion dollars a year.
And they result in 4,000 deaths per year.
And Mrs. Clinton says she's gonna have universal comfort, universal health care, whatever the hell, for 110 billion dollars a year.
It's interesting how this story starts out.
To many outside the U.S., America's health care system might seem an example of capitalism at its rawest.
Europeans and Canadians enjoy universal health care and cheap drugs thanks to government-run systems, the argument goes, but the market-based approach taken by the world's richest nation leaves many millions uninsured and leads the rest to pay the highest drug prices in the world.
Such doubts are sure to be reinforced this week by this week's release of Michael Moore's Sicco.
Uh, the movie, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, is America's health care system really in trouble?
Hardly, according to a growing body of academic evidence.
As a result, well, not is it, they say, is it really red in tooth and claw?
Hardly, according to a growing body of academic evidence.
As a result of interference at the federal and state levels, health care is one of America's most heavily regulated industries.
Indeed, its muddled approach to health care regulation may act as a massive drag on the American economy.
What one experts called a 169 billion dollar hidden tax.
That figure comes from a pathbreaking study of a few years ago by Christopher Conover of Duke.
It looked at the many ways in which the American legal and regulatory systems affect the provision of health services and lumped them into five categories: medical torts, the Food and Drug Administration, insurance regulation, and the certification of both health professionals and health facilities.
His team concluded that the overall benefit to society of 170 billion dollars per year delivered by this system of oversight was far outweighed by the $339 billion in annual costs that it imposed, and there's a chart here to show it.
Even ignoring the cost of big federal tax breaks for employer-sponsored health insurance, his study estimated, converse study estimated the net cost of America's health regulations resulted in perhaps 4,000 extra deaths each year, and was responsible for more than seven million Americans lacking health insurance.
In other words, and we've known this.
This is the we are not surprised to hear that we don't have a free market in health care.
That's what vouchers and all these health savings accounts are all about.
It's bad because of the way it is, and it's heading even worse, and now Mrs. Clinton comes along with her big announcement today.
And at ABC News.com, the uh story here by Liz Marlantis and Mary Walsh, Hillary Clinton, healthcare deja vu all over again.
It was one of the most spectacular defeats.
In legislative history, 1342-page disaster became a symbol of arrogance and unwieldy bureaucracy.
Contributed in large part to the Democrats' loss of the house.
For the first time in 40 years, but these days, Hillary isn't running away from that failure.
She's wearing it as a badge of honor, joking she's got the scars to show for it.
We set the groundwork in place so that now people are saying, boy, we wish we had done that back then, she told an audience in Carson City, Nevada.
Now get this.
Norman Ornstein, renowned.
Renowned political scientist.
Tremendous reputation out there from the American Enterprise Institute, quote, it's really quite remarkable how Mrs. Clinton is turning the health care debacle of 94 into an asset.
Hillary Clinton has two great things going for her on this issue.
The first is she knows it cold.
The second is that she can say I was for dramatic reform before any of the rest of you.
Well, well, well, we learned today how easy it is to spread a myth.
Mrs. Clinton doesn't know it cold.
She didn't write it.
She had nothing to do with the structure of Hillary Care in 93.
Bill did it.
This from an article in the American Prospect, a Lib publication by Paul Starr, who was on the team.
Hillary's sole job was to sell it, was to chair the commission and all this stuff testifying before all the congressional committees in charge of the bus trips, which we had fun with.
But she didn't do it.
She doesn't know it cold.
She doesn't know anything.
After 13 years, folks, 13 years, what has she ever really done that's worked out for anybody?
Hey, I fed an amazing story here from Salon.com, and they're very happy at Salon.
They think the Democrats might finally give up trying to get the white male Southern voter.
And that's that's that's great news.
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