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June 22, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
June 22, 2009, Monday, Hour #2
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Yes, this is Mark Stein, your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
America's anchorman is away.
He will be back Fighting Fit on Wednesday.
Take you through the end of the week.
Mark Davis will be here tomorrow, but we have two more hours of substitute host-level excellence in broadcasting to go today.
The Iranian situation is moving fast.
There's talk now that there may be some splits emerging among the clerics.
So the trick here, I think, for America isn't to do.
The trick for the world, really, is just to keep the pressure on.
The world has an interest in ending this regime, and the trick is just not easy.
Just apply the pressure subtly.
It's also a big week for healthcare, healthcare.
Health is a fascinating thing to me, by the way, because it has somehow become the defining issue of the nation.
Obama says we have to do something about healthcare.
Everybody says we have to do something about healthcare.
When you actually dig deep into the figures, there isn't really that big a healthcare problem.
The New York Times had a story that began with all the usual things.
The people wanted to solve healthcare.
They wanted to cover the uninsured.
They were willing to pay more taxes to it.
And they wanted to deal with it, deal with it, deal with it.
You dig deep into that New York Times story.
And in paragraph nine, also it emerges from this poll that 77% of people are entirely satisfied with their healthcare.
They're perfectly fine with the healthcare they get at the moment.
The overwhelming majority of the American people, according to the New York Times in this story, are satisfied with their healthcare.
So naturally, in the age of big government, we're going to destroy that system in order to solve a problem that doesn't really exist.
It is unaffordable.
And more than that, even if it were affordable, it would still be a disaster because government healthcare changes the relationship between the citizen and the state.
And it is, in fact, I think, an assault on citizenship.
And so we'll talk about that in the show.
1-800-282-2882.
The president today has announced he's plugging the donut hole.
This isn't, by the way, another visit to the ice cream parlor.
This is, despite him, I mean, presumably, the CBS White House correspondent just got the mini other word donut.
He said, hey, boys, hold the front page.
Pictures at 11.
We've got the president visiting a donut stand now.
Yes, it's it.
HR wants to know whether the doughnut is glazed.
No, but your eyes will be after reading the New York Times coverage of the donut story.
But this actually isn't.
This isn't part of the president's policy of restaurant visits.
It's not like his hamburger restaurant visit.
It's not like his visit to get a vanilla frozen custard brownie Sunday.
When he uses the doughnut here, it's purely metaphor.
It's a metaphorical donut.
So this may confuse the White House Prescott.
He said he wants to plug what they call the hole in the donut.
And under this, as I understand it, when you get prescription drugs, the government pays for the first five grams.
Then if you need another five grams, you pay for that yourself.
And you pay, it's like you're deductible or whatever.
No, no, it's the inverse.
It's like an...
It's like a...
It's like a...
Yeah, it's...
The government pays the first whatever.
Then if you need another 20 pills on top of that, you pay the next 20 pills and then the government pays the rest.
So it's like if you go and you get a new prescription Viagra or whatever, the government will pay for your first five dates.
You might have to pay for the one after that.
But then all the action you'll be getting is on the feds entirely, entirely free.
That's how it works, isn't it?
So now they're going to plug that gap because heaven forbid that you should have to pay for five grams of prescription for yourself.
The prescription drug plan for seniors targets, targets the wealthiest demographic in the United States.
May well be the wealthiest demographic, by the way, in global history.
Because however badly you think your grandparents have it, you're going to have it a lot worse by your age because you'll be having all the problems of old age plus the debt that your grandparents' generation has piled up under the Obama stimulus package and the multi-trillion dollar deficits and all the rest of it.
So however bad you think your grandparents have it, you're going to be having it 100 times worse.
But no, no, never mind all that.
We've still got to do something to plug this little hole in the doughnut for the prescription drug plans for seniors.
Because heaven forbid, heaven forbid that these seniors, these seniors should have to choose between prescription drugs and Tony Danzer doing South Pacific in dinner theater.
We cannot make them do that.
We cannot put them through that choice.
I'm not saying it.
Tony Danzer in South Pacific, by the way, if you see it, it's fantastic.
He plays it's a very touching story.
He plays a Uyghur planter living on this beautiful island who falls in love with an American ensign.
A psalm enchanted evening, you may see a Uyghur.
Anyway, I've completely lost my prescription drugs.
Yeah, that's it.
Heaven forbid we should make seniors choose between prescription drugs and all this other stuff.
They're the wealthiest demographic in the United States and maybe, as I said, in global history.
And there simply isn't enough money to make this work.
Obama, this is what I love about the guy.
Talk about audacity.
He said that we need, the reason healthcare is a priority, we need to, quote, fix healthcare, is to control costs.
Right now, government runs a portion of healthcare, an ever-increasing portion of healthcare.
It's actually just under 50% at the moment when you add up all the various elements of government healthcare.
But one thing you notice if you look at Medicare and Medicaid is that costs rise far faster, they're rising roughly 35% faster in the government area of healthcare than in private healthcare.
Now, why be surprised at that?
The minute you introduce a government bureaucracy in anything, the costs are going to bear no relation to the real costs or the real market value of that transaction.
So if you have the government annex the entire operation of the American healthcare system, the costs are going to be way out of control.
Unlike most of the guest hosts on this show, and unlike the host, I believe, I don't believe Russia's ever had the misfortune to be treated at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal or at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in England.
I've been treated in socialized hospitals.
And the one thing you learn about a socialized healthcare system very fast is that the only way of controlling costs is by restricting healthcare for you.
You're the only variable in the system.
On Friday afternoon, the health system still has to pay the doctor and the nurse and the janitor.
The only way of controlling costs is to restrict access to the system for you.
Now, if you don't mind that, if you don't mind a system in which you become the point at which costs are controlled, then fine, go along with government healthcare.
What it means, what it means, the essence of a government system for people who've never lived under it is waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting.
You wait for everything.
You wait years for operations that in America are routine.
Routine operations, you wait for years.
There was a story in Le Journal de Moriel last week that in the province of Quebec, people with severe incontinence, that's to say, people who get up to use the bathroom, a minimum of 12 times a night, have to wait three years for a simple half-hour procedure.
Now, when people talk about comparative costs of healthcare, they don't factor in, for example, the fact that you've had a sleepless night because you've been getting up to go to the bathroom 12 times and the consequent impact on your work performance every day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, for three years.
All those trips to the bathroom, 12 times a night, 365 nights a year for three years while you're waiting for a simple half-hour procedure that you could get at a week's notice if you drove an hour south of Montreal to Plattsburgh, New York or Burlington, Vermont.
The essence of a government system is that you wait and wait and wait because you, you, the patient, are the only point at which costs can be controlled.
And one of the great things about America is that healthcare is still a market here.
Healthcare is still a market.
If you want to get a procedure, you can get a procedure if you're prepared to write a check for it.
Not everybody can write a check for it.
Not everybody has coverage.
But the idea of sacrificing a system with which 77% of the American people, according to the New York Times, are content in order to solve a problem that isn't there and that will only add more costs and more time and more pain, because that's what it boils down to.
If you're waiting for a hip replacement, if you're waiting three years with severe incontinence for a simple half-hour procedure, what that is, is human pain.
You control costs by keeping you in more pain.
So I think this is an interesting exercise in testing the limits, as it were, of liberal guilt.
Because as we know, I think liberals and in fact a large number of the American people have decided that, okay, it's bad that there are whatever it is, 40, 45, 50, who knows what it's up to now, so many millions of unemployed, uninsured people.
Surely Obama said, look, we can insure all these people.
You can keep your healthcare coverage, and we're going to control costs.
That is not going to happen.
That is not going to happen.
Of all the variable outcomes in the reforms that are being proposed, the idea that your personal healthcare will stay unchanged and the idea that this will not add any costs and will in fact save money, those two things you can guarantee are not going to happen.
So we're going to talk about healthcare.
We're going to talk about the problems with the socialized system.
And we'll talk too about the problems with the American system, which is not the problem that the government and the Congress and the do something now, do something quick, do something big and expensive crowd say it is.
Lots more straight ahead.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
That's a...
What's the...
Mark tonight is sitting in for a rush.
I don't know.
What's that?
The Uyghur party night on the beach at Pala.
I don't know.
That's great.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
We're talking about healthcare, the so-called healthcare crisis, the so-called healthcare crisis, which is not a crisis.
And When people say it is a crisis, they pick these statistics.
For example, according to the United Nations, life expectancy in the United States is 78, whereas in the United Kingdom it's 79.
So that's great for socialized healthcare, isn't it?
You get an extra year of life under socialized healthcare in the UK.
But these life expectancy figures are all but meaningless.
I mean, they've basically all gone up in the same direction over the years, regardless.
In Albania, for example, in Albania, where the entire population chain smokes and the healthcare system basically involves swimming to Italy, life expectancy is still 71 years, about where America was a generation or so back.
Basically, once you get childhood mortality under control and you observe basic hygiene and lifestyle precautions, the health system is relatively marginal to that.
You can never, obviously you can never spend enough on healthcare because the outcome is always going to be a disaster.
You're still going to die.
We can spend even more trillions and trillions and trillions on healthcare and you are still going to die.
Even under President Obama, even President Obama, he can lower the rise of the oceans.
But even President Obama has not found a way yet to eliminate death from the American way of life.
So there is never ever going to be a perfect healthcare system.
And the reality is that all these bits and bobs about life expectancy rates and all the rest are marginal.
What is at issue here is liberty.
Once you have government health care, it licenses the government to do anything in the interests of healthcare.
For example, in Britain, they deny hip replacements.
In some parts of the country, in East Anglia, I think it is, they deny hip replacements to the overweight on the grounds that they overweight have made their choice to chow down on Twinkies, and so they're not going to be rewarded with a government hip, even though they paid for it in their taxes.
In Manchester, they will deny you treatment for heart disease if you're a smoker.
You made your choice, you lit your cigarette.
So even though you've paid enough in your taxes for like three chronic illnesses every year, we're not going to treat you for this.
And the health secretary says it's entirely appropriate to make, when you have a government system, to ration healthcare on the basis of lifestyle choices.
So that basically means that once you have government health care, the government can impact any other area of your life.
They've installed these security cameras.
You know, these things, these cameras they have on the interstates or whatever to check whether you're speed cameras, to check whether you're speeding.
They've now installed super duper cameras that can see inside your car to see if you're eating a cheese sandwich, to see if you're eating a donut, because you're no longer allowed to eat in cars in Britain.
Because if you, for the same basis as they did with the motorcycle helmets, if you have a crash, if you have an accident because you're having a cheese sandwich in your car, you have to be treated in a government hospital at government expense.
And so that fact, that simple fact of government health care, redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state and enables them to pass a whole bunch of other laws in respect of all kinds of other activities.
That's what's wrong with it.
As I said, these things are all marginal.
And the best thing you can do with healthcare, the problem with American healthcare is that essentially we've allowed too many third parties and now with the government a massive fourth party to intrude in what ought to be a customer-client relationship.
There's a lady doctor I know in California, and the Californian health system has been destroyed by illegal immigration and all the rest of it.
So it has particular problems.
It's a good snapshot of what things will be like in the rest of the country in some ways.
And she basically and some friends of hers have started running things where they don't take any HMOs, they don't take any insurers.
It's a straight cash transaction.
You go to see her because you've stubbed your toe.
She'll treat you for the stubbed toe and you write a check.
You go to see her because you've got a headache, you write a check for the headache.
A straight customer-supplier relationship.
And you'd be surprised once you simplify health care and return it as much as possible to a normal customer-supplier relationship, how affordable, how affordable it is.
The problem is, is what we've done by creating an insurance-based system is we're insuring for something that's going to happen.
We're insuring for something that is bound to happen.
Most of the things you buy insurance for are highly unlikely to happen.
You buy insurance for your car because it's a remote possibility that you're going to flip over, career across the median, roll three times off the highway.
That is most unlikely to happen.
That's why you insure against it, and that's why the insurance is affordable.
If you insure your house against the possibility of it burning down, the likelihood of your house catching fire and burning to the ground is very remote.
But healthcare is not remote.
We're all going to need something at some time in our life.
So the idea of erecting a vast bureaucracy to insure against the inevitable is an absurd basis to account for most health care, for most health care.
It would be entirely reasonable to have insurance for catastrophic health care for rare chronic diseases or whatever, but just insurance for everything.
And Obama wants to make this worse, by the way.
Obama's theory now is preventive health care.
So in other words, he wants to give you checks for everything.
Wouldn't it be great if instead of discovering you've got high cholesterol when you keel over from a massive heart attack when you're 58, if you could be tested every six months to see if you're at risk from high cholesterol from the age of 12?
And in the big picture, that is marginal.
That will be a marginal benefit to people, but will cost a huge amount of money, which is why it's attractive to Obama, because the minute it becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy, it's a permanent feature of life, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
And that's why Republicans need to resist this in Congress, because we cross this line.
We can never go back.
It fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state.
It brings it closer to something like junkie and pusher, and it makes it highly unlikely you can ever have genuinely conservative government ever again.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show from the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Yes, your undocumented anchorman here today, Mark Davis in tomorrow.
Rush back Wednesday.
We're talking about healthcare.
Let's go to Tracy in Warsaw, Indiana.
Tracy, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hi, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
My pleasure.
I just have a comment on this opinion liberals have about socialized medicine being so much more superior than what we currently have.
The bleeding hearts kind of like to go on and on and say, the problem is we have a for-profit healthcare system, and as long as it is for-profit, it's always going to have problems.
Well, here's my situation.
This is not in theory.
This is actually happening to my family.
My 17-month-old daughter, who has Down syndrome, is currently getting chemotherapy for leukemia.
Now, she's seeing two different specialists, a cardiologist who is from India and an oncologist who is from Indonesia.
They are two of the most highly regarded specialists in the entire world, and they are practicing their trade in the United States.
That is because we have a capitalist for-profit healthcare system.
These men who are the best and brightest in the world come to our country to practice their trade because they can make a fortune here.
They can provide for their families, and they can practice in a way that's encumbered only by the insurance companies, which again, it's not perfect.
But my daughter's prognosis is positive, and she's going to recover from this disease because the best health care in the world is being provided to her.
Yes, and that's actually a very good point about the medical profession.
Doctors from all over the world.
You can find in American hospitals doctors from all over the world.
And it is because they can make a good living here.
But it's also, I think, Tracy, because when you work in government systems, the government has too much control over the people you have to see, the hours you have to work, and in some jurisdictions, even where you practice.
For example, in parts of Canada, in Quebec, you can't practice in, you might have friends and family in Montreal, but you can't practice in Montreal.
They say, no, you have to go way up north and practice and have a surgery in Lac Saint-Jean.
The government, the Quebec government, tells the doctors which towns to practice in.
That's the degree of control.
And you're right, that that's why talented medical professionals come to the United States.
And in countries where they have advanced socialized systems, like the United Kingdom, medicine ceases to be a middle-class profession.
It's no longer attractive to the middle class anymore.
Why would you want to be a government bureaucrat and work in a dingy building for the whole of your life?
It's not something that's attractive to them.
You wouldn't.
And in theory, if we were already under this socialized medical kind of format, my daughter would be in danger of not even being approved by the bureaucrats to even get treatment because having Down syndrome, she's not someone who can be projected out to be a contributor to the system.
Yes, and that happens very, very frequently that they decide that certain people are not a priority for whatever reason and that they're not going to invest a lot of money in them.
Those healthcare, the healthcare decisions that you can make as a parent, more and more of those are taken out of your hands when you're in a government system.
Thanks very much for your call, Tracy.
You know, one of the other, I think, features that people don't understand is that the health system actually becomes a problem once it becomes a government system.
Because above anything else, the hospitals get dirtier.
They become terrible incubators of disease.
If you look at SARS, for example, which spread because from rural parts of China, not the Uyghur parts of China, by the way, I hasten to add, non-Uyghur areas of China, people, a pig is a prize professional.
Obviously, Uyghurs are Muslims, so a pig isn't a prize profession.
But in the non-Uyghu parts of China, a pig is a prize profession, a prize possession.
So they sleep with them in the living room.
The pig sleeps in the, oh, maybe the pig gets the master bedroom and the guy sleeps in the living room.
I don't know.
Anyway, they like their pigs, and so the pigs sleep in the house.
And so this thing, SARS, jumped from the Porcine community to the human community.
And then some cousin goes up to visit his pal in Hong Kong and spreads it to everyone in the elevator, and they fly around the world.
What happened in Toronto?
In Toronto, it was spread by the medical system.
The person with SARS who went to be treated by SARS was left on a gurney in emergency, coughing and hacking away for, I think it was 48, 72 hours before he was seen.
And at that point, he'd infected a whole bunch of other people in the room, including visiting Americans, members of some, I think, a charismatic or an evangelical Christian group or something, who then went back to upstate New York and infected a whole bunch of people in upstate New York.
Essentially, the Scarborough Hospital in Toronto incubated SARS and spread it to the general population.
If you look at in the United Kingdom, you go into hospital to be treated for disease A, you will come out with disease B, one of these strange infections that now essentially exist only in hospitals.
If you go into a hospital, you get them.
My father's currently being treated in a British hospital, and every time he goes in, he comes out with this thing called C. difficile.
C. difficile is essentially a hygiene issue.
And it's because socialized hospitals are so decrepit and the staff are so overworked that even basic hygiene procedures are not observed.
Another friend of mine miscarried.
She felt herself miscarrying, went to the Royal Victoria Hospital, started to bleed, sat there in emergency, bleeding all over the floor, the pool of blood spreading all over the floor to surrounding persons in the room.
Eventually, a nurse came out and said that you'll still have to wait for the doctor.
By the way, could you stop bleeding?
She said, I can't stop bleeding.
I'm miscarrying.
A cleaner comes through with a dirty mop, wipes the blood, streaks the blood up the corridor, past everyone, all the dirty blood, up the corridor, into whatever the next ward is.
But she's run her mop over it once, and so that's okay.
Chlamydia.
If you don't know what chlamydia is, consider yourself very lucky.
Labrador, the Labrador healthcare system gave whatever, in Labrador, there's nobody in Labrador.
It's like there's mosquitoes the size of golf balls and a few Inuit, and that's it.
But otherwise, nobody in, nobody in, nobody in.
It's where like your big shot, your really highly skilled fishermen like to go on fishing trips.
It's almost as good as the beaches at Palau.
So maybe we'll see Uyghur fishing tourism in Labrador.
But Labrador, the hospital there gave chlamydia, and as I said, if you don't know what it is, consider yourself grateful.
Consider yourself very lucky.
They gave it to like 120 women in this one hospital because they didn't rinse the spatula or whatever you call it between patients.
Because, you know, when you're in a socialized system, you're always short of everything.
There's never enough of anything.
There's never enough time.
What happens?
You don't wash your hands between patients.
You have one cleaner with one dirty mop for two floors of the hospital.
You forget to wash the spatula or whatever you call it between patients.
You go into hospital and you come out with a new disease that you didn't previously have.
That is the big problem with that.
That is one of the things that happens with socialized health care.
Now, here, I love it when you go in.
I love the character of American hospitals.
When you go to too often when you go to hospitals, I've been treated, by the way, I've been treated, and I hate to make it sound as if I'm this wee, sickly little thing.
I've been treated in a lot of hospitals.
I've been treated under the Bulgarian health care system, which is an interesting glimpse of how you'll be...
I went on a skiing trip to Bulgaria.
There was a great deal.
And there was a reason it was a great deal because the toe lift broke my knee on the first day.
Because it wasn't, it's not like these sophisticated lifts you'd have at Vail or whatever.
So although it only cost 37 bucks, it ended up tearing a ligament money.
So they put a big cast on me, a big plaster cast.
I get back, and they saw off the cast, and I'm like howling in pain as the guy's doctor sawing it off.
I'm going, ah!
And he goes, you big sissy, you big fairy, you big girly boy.
What are you screaming for?
Howling in pain.
He gets the cast off my leg.
There's a huge gash from my upper thigh all the way down to my ankle.
He goes, oh, I guess they use really thin plaster in Bulgaria.
That is socialized healthcare.
They save on everything.
There's never enough on everything.
And yet the cost of the system, because of the cost of the bureaucracy, is just explosive.
We're talking about healthcare on the Rush Limbaugh Show, and we will have lots more straight ahead on the EIB network.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network talking about healthcare.
Here's a headline to treasure on socialized healthcare.
Man's broken neck misdiagnosed a severe headache.
I hate it when that happens.
That's two days ago, Paul Curtis of Carlingford, Australia.
He had a chip out of his spine, but they gave him some headache pills.
They told him, actually, they didn't even give him a headache.
They just told him to take a couple of aspirins.
Go home.
Let's go to Denise in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, one of the great town names on the U.S. map.
And not just a town name, not just a quiz show, but in actual fact, a good moral lesson in life.
Truth or Consequences.
Denise, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hi, Mark.
I'll say something nice before I tell you how mad I am at you.
Okay.
You're the only guest host we listen to and Rush isn't there.
Oh, that's very sweet.
But the other guys are good too.
Listen to Mark Davis tomorrow.
Okay, I take it that's the nice thing.
That's the nice thing.
That's the nice thing.
I'm really mad at you.
Are you?
Yes, I'll tell you.
My husband and I are in this donut hole.
Right.
We're both disabled.
We're only in our late 40s.
We worked hard our whole life.
We've never asked the government for anything.
But I'll tell you, this donut hole thing is terrible.
We're on like 15 medications.
It costs like $2,500 for three medications a month.
We've both been in our donut hole since February.
I think you're wrong.
I think it's only $2,700 that's covered.
And then you have to come up with the next $5,000.
Right.
We owe more on medications a month than we bring in.
Yeah, but just let's pull back a little and think about that.
Because there's two approaches to that.
You can have a, you could have, you and your husband are disabled.
Now, right from the start, that puts you in a relatively unusual category in the United States because there aren't, and you're in, and you're, as you say, you're in your 40s.
So this happened young.
And so what is the solution to your situation?
Is the solution to develop a vast universal plan for everybody that plugs that donut hole or to do a more targeted one?
And the answer I would say is to do something targeted rather than do something in which relatively wealthy people who can afford their prescription drugs have it picked up by the few remaining taxpayers who are our net contributors.
But I would also say something else, Denise, which I think is the case, is that if you take the government out of healthcare as much as you can, then the cost of a lot of those prescription drugs would actually reflect the market reality.
And I think, for example, once you have government annex a big demographic in healthcare, as it does with seniors, and seniors, generally speaking, need more routine health care in the form of prescription drugs than other people.
Well, one thing that does is it artificially distorts the market.
It's like, in a sense, prescription drugs becomes like a company town.
You know, in a company town, you have one big market where there's no, if you have the government, there's no particular accountability for cost or anything.
So in a sense, it's an artificial price that is set for whatever particular pill it is.
It's not a price for the pill that reflects the market.
It's a price for the pill that reflects the fact that the tab for it is being picked up in a vast government bureaucracy.
So it would be in your interest, I think, I think it would be in your interest to support the reprivatization of significant portions of American healthcare.
And that would bring down the cost of the, and that would bring down the cost of those drugs.
It's the existing government distortion.
Yeah.
No, I don't want socialized medicine.
I don't, because I am a very sick person.
I see a lot of doctors and I'm scared to death that I would have to wait in line or that they would just say, you know what, she's going to die eventually.
Anyway, forget her, you know?
Yeah, you want that.
Well, and you certainly don't want to be in a socialized system where you're waiting longer between treatment and where, as you say, they've determined that you're not a priority, so it's not worth spending any money.
These strange codes you have, these strange little check marks you see at the end of the bed in socialized hospitals, which are to do with whether it's worth the nurse calling the doctor if something goes wrong with this patient or whether it's just leaving him because, you know, you're not that important, so why bother saving you?
Denise, I think the solution for your problem is not more government, more government annexation to the universal point will only put up the cost of those drugs and give you worse treatment in the long run.
But I certainly didn't mean to insult you, so I hope you'll keep listening.
I just think they need to figure out, I don't mean that the government has to take over the donut hole, but somebody has to get rid of it because there's got to be other people and there's got to be seniors like me that are living month to month on what the government gives them.
Well, I mean, we paid into it.
Yes, exactly.
But that's the point.
When you say you pay into it, you never get back.
That's why government plans never work because everybody talks about, oh, we paid into it and we never get it back.
That's because there's no market.
Everything else in real terms comes down.
They invent new things and the price comes down.
They invent a computer and it's a huge thing and hardly anyone can afford it and then it becomes routine and everybody has it.
That's what happens.
Luxury products become routine products.
When the government takes over things, routine products eventually become luxury products that you have to wait months and months and years and years for, which is the problem with government healthcare.
But thanks for your call, Denise.
We've got to run, got to take a break, and we will be back because we are one of the few remaining outposts of American life that has not yet been bailed out by the government.
We'll be back with more straight ahead on the EIB network.
Mark Stein, sitting in for a rush on the EIB network.
You know, my favourite example, the defining example of Canadian healthcare and socialized healthcare in general is a story I like about a lady called Deborah Cornthwaite who gave birth to two twin boys at the Royal Alexandria Hospital in Edmonton.
That's in Alberta.
She'd begun the day by going to her local maternity ward at Langley Memorial Hospital, which is in British Columbia.
Her contractions were coming every four minutes.
They said, sorry, we don't have a bed, but here you can call 1-800 BC Bedline, and they will tell you whether there are any beds at any other hospitals.
And there were no hospitals in any other hospital in the province of, no beds at any other hospital in the province of British Columbia.
So after spending seven hours doing red tape and paperwork, they graciously agree to let her drive to the airport, put her on a chartered twin prop to Edmonton, Alberta.
By that point, the contractions were coming every two and a half minutes.
And most Lamar's classes don't teach you how to time your breathing to turbulence over the Rockies in a twin prop.
How many Americans want to do that on delivery day?
You pack your bag and head to the local hospital in Oakland and they say, great news, we've got a bed for you in Denver.
That is socialized healthcare, the 10-month wait for the maternity ward.
You really do not want to introduce this system here, America.
Mark Snyder, sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbo Shogue.
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