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June 11, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:55
June 11, 2009, Thursday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Hey, welcome back.
We're here, Rush Limbaugh, serving humanity, executing assigned host duties flawlessly.
Zero mistakes.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
President Obama this afternoon in Green Bay doing a town hall meeting promoting his socialized medicine reform.
And an unidentified member of the audience says, what's your philosophy about primary care and the role of primary care?
You subscribe to the medical home theory.
How do you engage patients?
Did somebody really show up with this question?
I'm sorry, I interrupted myself halfway through the question.
I just, I have my doubts here that somebody got up in Green Bay today.
So I'm going to go to the town meeting.
I got a question.
What is your philosophy about primary care and the role of primary care?
Do you subscribe to the medical home theory?
How do you engage patients in this model so that that risk can be better managed and we can ultimately result in a population that has better health at a lower cost?
Now, would somebody I just I can't sit here and believe that some citizen in Green Bay came up with this question.
Well, I'm not suggesting anything.
I just I'm saying that this is a planted question.
Anyway, here's the ones answer.
The more we are incentivizing high quality primary care prevention, wellness, management of chronic illnesses.
I mean, one of the things that it turns out is that about 20% of the patients account for 80% of the care and the costs of the health care system.
And if we can get somebody, first of all, who is overweight to lose weight so that they don't become diabetic, we save tons of money.
Bingo, and that's exactly what he's going to have the power to do.
That's the kind of power he's looking for once they get this.
You know, Mona Charon in her syndicated column today said, this is the ballgame.
Obama's health care is the ballgame.
If he gets this, this never gets rolled back.
If he gets this, virtually every behavior that we engage in could be subject to regulation based on its cost to health care.
Now, this statistic, 20% of the patients account for 80% of the care.
Would he care to tell us the age of that 20%?
Because I will guarantee you that the bulk of that 20% are people who have fewer years ahead of them than they have lived.
I'm not being insulting here.
I'm just saying 20% of the pay.
Most of our expensive health care comes as we approach the end of life.
Fact of life.
That ought to tell us right there where we need to stop spending money on health care.
This public option versus the private option.
Look, all they're going to do is be expanding Medicare.
That's all they're going to do, folks.
Medicare is going to be expanded to where everybody has to use it.
Even if you have a private option, even if you're able to go out and buy private insurance, you're still going to have to opt into the Medicare program.
That's the objective.
Now, Obama said a previous soundbite that we played.
Obama said Great Britain has a system of socialized medicine.
Nobody's talking about doing that.
And that's, as I said, I really, I don't like this man putting me in a position to have to accuse him of lying.
Don't like saying that about the President of the United States, but one of his first acts upon taking office was to provide $1.1 billion through the Porculus bill for a national health care board that was designed to oversee the effectiveness of health services modeled after the UK's National Institute for Clinical Excellence.
$1.1 billion was spent to create an identical type of bureaucracy that UK has, the United Kingdom, Britain, in its healthcare program.
He also entitled the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research.
Its description sidesteps its intent of cost containment, noting that it will coordinate the conduct or support of comparative effectiveness and related health services research.
As the bill was passed without legislators reading it, the picture of the Porculus bill, let alone studying it, many concerns have been raised since its passage, both in the political and public realms regarding exactly what and who this comparative effectiveness research will analyze and how those results are going to be implemented or enforced.
The bottom line, he's already set up a socialized medicine health care board in the porculus bill modeled after the UK, which he admitted is a socialist system, socialized medicine.
There's no other way to describe what the man wants to do than to call it socialized medicine.
Single-payer socialized medicine.
And it's all about control.
It's not about cost.
This man's not worried about the cost of anything.
He doesn't care what anything costs.
A trip to New York for a date?
$12 trillion in debt over 10 years?
He doesn't care what things cost.
That's just to make you think he does.
He doesn't care what health care costs.
We don't have, in strict financial terms, we don't have the money as a country to be buying anything.
We don't have the money.
Do you realize we only have the money because the Chinese buy our bonds?
But we don't have the money.
We are spending so far beyond our income.
He doesn't care about that.
There's no way any government program has reduced the cost of anything that I know of.
Do you know that 25 or 30 years ago, there were, let me find this, where is it here?
Mona Charon has it.
Sally Pipes, Top 10 Myths of American Healthcare.
30 years ago, in Medicare, Medicaid, and so forth, there were 252 mandates on insurance companies.
Today, there are 1,901 mandates.
That's an average of 38 per state.
Now, what is a mandate?
Well, to understand a mandate, you first have to beware of politicians bearing statistics.
And what's even more galling than misleading or using outright false statistics is to watch politicians rail about the expense of health insurance without once acknowledging their own role in jacking up the price.
Healthcare is expensive, but our Jerry-built system has made buying insurance much more expensive than it should be.
State mandates require insurance companies to cover a variety of specialized medical services, usually at the behest of lobbyists.
Examples of mandates that some states now require to be covered by health insurance in vitro fertilization, marriage therapy, smoking cessation classes, hormone replacement therapy, chiropractor visits, and so on.
All of these mandates, and there were only 252 of these 30 years ago.
Now there are almost 2,000.
And each new mandate raises the cost to the insurance company.
If you're going to force them to cover marriage therapy or alcohol and drug abuse, if you're going to force them to cover that, what do you think is going to happen to the premiums?
They have to go up.
All of these mandates make it, and these are just the tip of the iceberg.
Once they get this mandate, this whole program under their belt in Washington, they're going to be mandating everything, and they're going to be covering it, and we're going to be paying for it.
So the mandates make it impossible here for companies to offer cheap, no-frills, high-deductible plans for the young and the healthy.
When 20% of the population is responsible for 80% of the health care cost, what that tells us is that we ought to offer insurance plans to the young that basically handle their catastrophes, potential catastrophes and emergencies.
But not everyday walks of life matters, like marriage therapy or just a standard checkup visit or what have you.
But we do.
These people that are not putting much strain on the healthcare system ought to be able to buy insurance policies that don't cost very much money at all.
But there's no availability of those kinds of policies because of all the mandates from the states that insurance companies have to cover.
And by the way, the insurance companies don't mind because guess who's paying for the insurance in a lot of cases?
Employers?
The government?
I tell you, this whole system went south the moment the government got involved in this something like 40 years ago.
Because when the consumer, when the patient no longer was responsible for the bill, that was the end of it.
Imagine if we had hotel room insurance.
What do you think a hotel room would cost if you didn't have to pay for it, if somebody else was?
Or anything, if you had insurance for any other service, car insurance, not rec, but just to own one.
What do you think would happen to the price?
When the consumer figures out that he didn't have to pay for it, he doesn't care.
When the employer is providing the insurance, the consumer doesn't care.
And that's why consumers now all of a sudden complain about copays and how much they do have to pay because they don't expect to have to pay anything.
That's the way the whole system's been built.
And you haven't seen anything yet until they get what they want.
Now, the New York Times has an interesting story today.
Doctors Group opposes public insurance plan.
This is the AMA.
As the healthcare debate heats up, the American Medical Association is letting Congress know that it will oppose creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan, which Obama and other Democrats see as essential.
The opposition comes as Obama prepares to address the AMA on Monday in Chicago.
But the doctors, my friends, the AMA doesn't have a whole lot of bargaining power.
And do you want to know why?
The reason is if these doctors, if the AMA get too aggressive here, they risk angering Democrats who already control their income via Medicare.
This is political health care at play here.
If the doctors are too aggressive in fighting the public plan, they risk alienating Democrats whose support they need for legislation to increase their Medicare fees.
Right now, what's the it is I need these statistics right in front of me, and I'm not sure that it's in this particular story, but right now, Medicare reimburses doctors 81%, and in some cases, less.
The government's already telling doctors what they can earn and what they can charge with Medicare patients, which is why a lot of doctors are opting out of Medicare.
And one of the reasons they want national health care is to get doctors back in it and give doctors no choice.
So the 81%, and if they anger these Democrats too much, okay, we're going to cut your pay to 60%.
They could do it.
Now, there's a, you know, we've talked about Obama in his teleprompter.
And the teleprompter has a website, a blog.
And here's the entry for yesterday.
Big guy, meaning Obama, this is the teleprompter talking to us here on its blog.
Big guy's pretty excited, going to get to go home to Chicago next week for a speech on his health care reform plan.
We're going to be speaking at the AMA.
It might seem like the wrong forum for Big Guy to talk about how under our health care plan, we're essentially going to take money out of the pockets of doctors and make them work for free, but that's overlooking two facts.
One, this is Obama, and we're doing it in Chicago.
As Emmanuel says, the doctors will like it, or they can practice medicine at the bottom of Lake Michigan and see how well that billing system works for them.
This is the, of course, it's satire and humor, but this is founded in reality, why it's funny.
So the AMA, they're not happy about this at all, but they don't have much choice because they're so dependent on Medicare for so much of their income.
I tell you, I don't know why we believe anything Obama says.
He said that unemployment would not rise above 8%.
He is spending this nation into bankruptcy.
He has no idea how his policy will work or any of his policy, none whatsoever.
He has no idea how to pay for this.
He has done nothing to fix Medicare or Medicaid.
Why believe anything he says?
What has he ever run?
He's never run anything.
All he's done is agitate people in neighborhoods in Chicago.
But he's never run anything, much less successfully.
I don't want to hear about good intentions.
I don't want to hear about how he's going to lower costs.
He doesn't know how to do this.
He doesn't know the first thing about health care.
He knows about liberalism and ideology.
And he knows about power.
He knows about authoritarianism.
He doesn't know beans about the healthcare business.
He doesn't know anything about the car business.
He doesn't know.
And he's put somebody in charge who admits he doesn't know the car business at General Motors.
He doesn't know anything.
I don't know why anybody believes anything he says.
He has already, with projected budget deficits for the next 10 years, run up a $12 trillion debt, which is going to end up higher, actually.
It always does.
And yet he's not done.
He's not finished.
The AMA, as I said in the opening of this program, we're now being trained.
We're now being told to hate the doctors and to hate the insurance companies.
This is an administration and liberalism that fosters and promotes hate to get what it wants.
And you watch the AMA now, they're on the front page of New York telling, oh, we don't like what Obama's going to do.
You watch how they're going to be characterized in the next couple of days.
They're going to be characterized as a special interest group, only out for themselves, and they're going to pit the AMA doctors against all of you for the express purpose of getting you to hate the doctors, to put pressure on the doctors to buckle and accept Obama's plan.
That's how this is going to happen.
You just wait.
These Medicare doctors, they're in the same spot as the bankers are.
The Medicare doctors are in the same spot as the car company executives are.
Just like Ken Lewis or just like General Motors, Chrysler, they are controlled by government already, and they're going to be controlled even more by government.
And yet, President Obama in Green Bay had the audacity to say this.
Government can't do all of this.
I'm the first one to acknowledge this.
That's why I'm always puzzled when people go out there creating this boogeyman about how Obama wants government run every I don't want government to run stuff.
Like I said, I've got enough stuff to do.
I've got North Korea and I've got Iran and I've got Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I don't know where people get this idea that I want to run stuff or I want government to run stuff.
I think it'd be great if the healthcare system was working perfectly and we didn't have to be involved at all.
That would be wonderful.
That's not how it's worked.
Ken Lewis, Bank of America chief executive, testified today in Washington and said this.
It is true that we were told that if we went through, or I can't exactly remember the exact words, so please give me license with word for word.
But basically, if we went through with calling the MAC, that the government could or would remove management and the board.
And I've said in the past that it was the threat, the threat was not what gave me concern.
What gave me concern that they would make that threat to a bank in good standing.
So it showed the seriousness with which they thought that we should not call a MAC, a material adverse change.
And so as a result of that, that was a factor in our decisions because you hear your regulators and the federal government was saying, we don't think calling the MAC is the best thing for you or the financial system.
Obama doesn't want to control anything.
This is Ken Lewis basically admitting that he, Bank of America, was pressured into buying Merrill Lynch.
Obama didn't want to run anything.
He doesn't want to run anything.
He's not doing a thing about Iran or Afghanistan or Iraq.
He is running General Motors.
He is running Chrysler.
He has appointed people.
He's firing CEOs.
What does he mean?
He doesn't want to run anything.
Good God, folks.
What the hell is this bump?
You know, it's Baker Street.
See, I haven't heard this in so long.
It sounds like somebody's screaming on an operating table to me.
All right.
I thought Mamon was bringing home music from home again.
One more healthcare story, then I want to go to the phones.
You remember this story from back in April?
In the past six years, this is the Austin American statesman.
In the past six years, eight people from Austin and one from Luling, Texas racked up 2,678 emergency room visits in central Texas, costing hospitals, taxpayers, and others $3 million, according to a report from a nonprofit made up of hospitals and other providers that care for the uninsured and low-income of Central Texan.
Nine people in six years went to one emergency room 2,600 times.
This points out something that is never discussed in healthcare.
And that is the abuse of the system by American citizens.
Abuse that is paid for by everybody else.
What has become part and parcel of the whole healthcare debate is that we're all sick all the time.
We are all justified in going to the doctor every day because we're told every day that drinking this is going to kill us or eating that's going to prolong your risk to cancer or driving that fast.
We're told we're sick every day.
The sun can make us sick.
So people go to the doctor all the time.
We never talk about curbing that.
We never talk about people curbing.
We do try to get people to drive less.
We do try to get people to drive smaller cars, but we don't ever tell people, stay away from the doctor.
You're not sick.
Here are people going to the ER because there's a law in the country says if you don't have any health insurance covered, you're going to still get covered at the ER.
That's why it's always been bogus to talk about the number of people without health insurance because nobody is denied medical care here of an emergency nature.
Go to the ER.
We never ever talk about those of our fellow citizens who are not little angels and victims of whatever's going on.
They're a bunch of spoiled, brat, slothful hypochondriacs who abuse the system and cost everybody a whole bunch of, but we never ever hear, we only hear the opposite, that everybody's sick all the time and everybody justified to every trip to the doctor they make.
All right.
Of course I know what I've just done and I guarantee you more people agree with me than not.
How else?
2,600 visits from nine people into one ER over six years.
What the hell else is this?
Nine people, snerdly.
Of course I know what I just said.
Nine people.
One emergency room.
2,678 visits in six years.
Nine people.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine people.
Do I know what I just said?
Not only do I know what I just said, I'm damn proud of myself for saying it.
Just like we have trained a whole generation of people to not work and think they're entitled to be paid for it anyway, we have created millions of people who think they're entitled to a doctor visit every day with one sniffle, one sneeze, or one cough.
We've got everybody thinking that everything in life is going to kill them, that they're getting sick every day.
The danger's inside the house, we just had that story, then the danger's outside the house.
My God, folks, do you realize life is such a risk?
We all should have just been aborted.
And now we've got a story today that maybe in a couple of billion years, the Earth might collide with Mercury.
So for those of you still alive, a couple billion years from now, that's another thing you have to be afraid of.
And so you can develop a psychosis and go to some psychiatrist if your health care insurance covers it because somebody told you the earth's going to collide with mercury in a couple billion years.
See how this works?
No wonder.
We have any walking zombies we have in this country.
And it's not all their fault.
I mean, all they got to do is watch government run media for one straight week.
And they will hear a minimum of 10 different things that's currently killing them or threatening to kill them.
All right.
Rebecca in Ormond Beach, Florida.
I'm glad you waited.
Rebecca, thank you much.
Rush, I agree with every syllable, every sentence you say.
Oh, great one.
I called 17 years ago, and you encouraged me to go to medical school.
My husband and I are both family physicians.
We are pro-life doctors.
We have five children.
I could not agree with you more.
It is a combination.
The whole healthcare debacle is a combination of no personal responsibility.
People run to the doctor for everything.
How many cases of swine flu did I see?
Zero.
How many patients came thinking they had the swine flu?
1,000.
They come for toenail fungus.
And then the other part that I've heard you talk on in the past is defensive medicine.
You know, a guy comes in with a headache, and I know it's just a mind.
I send him out with a pill, but no, I've got to order an MRI and get him to a neurologist.
And that's cha-ching, you know, every visit.
You do the math, and you can see how billions of unnecessary tests.
Exactly right.
Because if this guy comes in with a headache and you don't give him all the tests and he goes out and has a wreck in a car, he can sue you.
Right, exactly.
So that defensive medicine could be fixed by a simple reform of the tort system.
Personal responsibility, reform of the tort system.
We do not need, you know, more Medicare.
We don't even take Medicaid.
Medicare is a mess.
We do not need Obama-run health care.
When did I recommend you or suggest you become a doctor?
I called you, Quincy, Illinois in 92.
You said, follow what you love.
I always loved medicine, and I went to med school.
It was the best thing I ever did.
And is that where you met your husband?
I met my husband in residency in Daytona Beach, and we're pro-life doctors.
We don't even write birth control.
We have a lovely practice.
We have eight employees.
We run this practice for eight years.
I think we have a very good reputation in town.
We love what we do.
How many Medicare patients do you have?
I have 5,000 patients.
Probably more.
I mean, last count.
But how many of them are Medicare?
Testing.
Hello.
Did we lose her?
Oh, the line dropped.
Well, I wanted to ask her, how much does she get reimbursed?
Because I think that's the 81% figure, in some cases lower, for the Medicare cases.
And she had 5,000 patients.
I don't think they're all Medicare, but we'll be able to ask another doctor at some point.
We see that, folks, 17 years ago, I told this woman, follow your passions, follow what you love.
And look at it.
She did it.
Yeah, I don't think I advise her to get married, but I did suggest follow your passions.
Go to Meds because she did it.
Robin in Martinsburg, Virginia.
Hello, and welcome to the EIB Network.
Thank you, Rush.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
Yes, ma'am.
I was born and raised in New Zealand and left there when I was 22 to come to the States, which was the best thing I ever did in my life.
Really?
I'm thinking of buying property there.
Well, I mean, it's a great country to buy property in.
I saw a ranch there.
You got something that for, I mean, a huge, huge ranch, a lot of acreage, and it wasn't, it was remarkably inexpensive.
It's a beautiful country, but I was raised on socialized medicine.
Yeah, that's the only bad thing about it.
It's not.
I go back every year to visit my family.
And what I wanted to mention about socialized medicine is that my mother was on a waiting list for three years before she could have cataract surgery done.
There are waiting lists there for people who need hip replacements done, knee replacements done, where they have to wait five years to get that done.
And so a lot of times people pass away before they come up to have their surgery.
The people who get cancer and new chemotherapy, the older they are, they're not given chemotherapy.
It's saved for the younger ones to save the cost.
And so it's not a good program.
I just wanted to mention that.
Yeah, we hear horror stories like that out of the UK, too.
Yes.
And it's gotten so bad there that there aren't any lines.
There's still lines, but they're telling somebody, look, if you get breast cancer, stay at home.
We can't handle it.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's, they hear the same things to a lesser degree from Canadians.
Well, yeah, that governor of Colorado, Richard Lamb, Richard Lamb said they only have a duty to die and get out of the way.
And not put so much pressure, cost pressure on the health care system.
Yeah.
And by the way, he was Democrat that was urging that to happen.
I got some more I want to say on healthcare, but there's the remaining moments here.
But something, anyway, Obama said he's working on a lot of stuff out there.
North Korea is working on Iraq.
He doesn't have time to run the healthcare.
He doesn't have time to run the car company.
It's silly.
I don't want to run it.
You ain't got too much to deal with out there.
Like North Korea nuking up, Iran nuking up.
He's not doing anything about it.
Key world powers agreed yesterday on a draft of a United Nations resolution that would sharply increase export and financial sanctions against the Norcs as punishment for its recent nuclear weapons and missile tests.
Well, it really stopped Iran, didn't it?
Folks, North Korea.
Now, they've been in the news a little bit lately, but they've been overwhelmed here by other things.
But North Korea is on the minds of those at the Heritage Foundation, has been for months now.
They have been reading research and sightful information at askheritage.org for some time.
Members have been doing this.
Long before state-controlled media picked up the story on North Korea, the Heritage Foundation was producing and releasing a film called 33 Minutes.
33 Minutes is the length of time that it would take for a ballistic missile launched from North Korea to reach a U.S. city with devastating effects.
33 minutes.
But don't worry, Obama's working on it.
Don't want to control anything.
This documentary, 33 Minutes, makes the case for just how Americans can and should protect themselves.
So members of the Heritage Foundation already up to speed on the effects of Obama's budget cut request of some $1.4 billion in missile defense.
That's a budget cut at the absolute wrong time.
If you become a member at askheritage.org, you can view highlights of this documentary, www.askheritage.org.
Become a member, I am.
It's cost-effective.
One of the many, many things you suddenly have access to is setting up a screening of this film with friends and neighbors.
33 minutes.
AskHeritage.org.
That's an unbelievable story we had from the doctor from Ormond Beach 17 years ago, inspired by me to become a doctor, proving that I create jobs, proving that I save jobs.
All she needed was a little encouragement, and then she decided to go to medical school.
And now she's helping other people.
What is Obama inspiring?
What is Obama inspiring?
What is he encouraging people to do?
Nothing.
It's sit on their butts.
He's encouraging people to give up to sit on their butts and let the government redistribute wealth to them.
He's not inspiring anybody.
He is, in fact, his policies are depressing the whole spirit of achievement.
He goes out there.
It talks about preventative medicine, preventive care.
Somebody explained something to me.
How is waiting in lines preventive of anything?
How is rationing health care preventive of anything?
He's out there selling bull again, folks.
Cut costs, ration care, yet offer more care to more people.
It's all nuts.
He just cannot be believed.
And he really demonstrated this today, as he does every day.
I have an idea.
And it's a very simple idea.
Why don't we wait to see how his promises on the economy work out before he takes over another 20% of the private sector?
What's the hurry here?
American people aren't in a hurry.
Slow down, Barack.
You've already spent $12 trillion.
You don't have the money to do this anyway.
Let's sit back.
Let's wait and see if anything else he's doing works before we jump into this.
That's what the Republicans ought to be saying instead of fooling around on the margins of this, accepting the premise.
Just put your hand up and say, stop.
We're going to wait until see.
You Republicans want a campaign slogan?
I'll give you one.
It's very simple.
We're not Democrats.
We are not Democrats.
I'll tell you why Obama wants to hurry.
I'll answer my own question.
If he doesn't get it done now, he's not going to get it done because everything he's doing is falling apart.
Everything he's doing is crumbling.
He's in a state of panic out there.
He wants it done because he gets this.
He gets health care.
And folks, as Mona Charon wrote, it's the ballgame.
That's all she wrote.
In socialized medicine, government-run healthcare.
You heard him say the overweight.
Folks, I got to tell you something.
I think those of you that regularly exercise, playing softball, baseball, basketball, soccer, mountain biking, running, rock climbing, skiing, skating, running, you're the people getting injured.
You're the people showing up at the hospital with busted knees and tendons and skin cancer, ankle sprains, knee and hip replacements, broken bones, concussions, muscle, ligament, tendon, cartilage strains, and tears, tendinitis, rotator cuff tears.
All you exercise freaks.
You're the ones putting stress on the healthcare system.
What happens when people don't regularly exercise, keep their weight relatively under control?
Nothing.
They probably don't even know their doctor's names.
So you're urged to go out there, do all of this stuff, and you're ending up in a hospital all the time with these injuries.
And some people think these injuries are badges of honor.
Knee surgery scars, a badge of honor shows toughness.
Yeah.
Toughness somebody else has to pay for.
We'll be back.
Well, it's the fastest week in me to you, folks.
Do you realize it's Thursday already?
Tomorrow's going to be Friday, and that's Open Line Friday, where I take one of the greatest career risks ever taken in big media, and that's letting rank amateurs pick the subjects that we talk about.
Lovable, but nevertheless, rank amateurs.
Gotta go.
Been fun today.
See you tomorrow, and we'll look forward to it.
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