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July 8, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:49
July 8, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Hey, great to be with you.
America's Anchorman is away this week, and this is your undocumented anchor man.
I just slip quietly across the border.
I'm not like those uh I'm not one of these uh people like these Uyghurs.
I don't get the I don't get the upgraded to the Bermuda Beach Resort.
Uh instead they just uh ship me down to New York uh and I gotta do this show.
But uh it's a great honor to be here.
Mark Davis will be here Friday, and then Rush returns on Monday.
We're gonna return to uh Neil in Lafayette, Louisiana uh in a minute, because we just wanted to finish up with what we were talking about there.
But you know, uh b before we move on from this uh uh cap and trade business.
One of the most ridiculous things about this is this marks a new low in the whole phoniness uh of the climate change thing.
You know these carbon credits uh that uh the that you trade back and forth and supposedly uh uh enable you to carry on polluting, and in return uh a uh terrorist mastermind living at the back of a smelly cave in Waziristan, uh he agrees not to uh not to use his cell phone because every time he does do it, the Pentagon launch a missile at his cave.
Uh so he agrees uh to uh downgrade his uh his uh carbon footprint, and in return you get to go and pollute a bit more.
Uh the the the that whole thing was ridiculous anyway, this carbon credit trading carbon credits.
But the the Congress has made it managed to do the the uh effectively the jumping of the endangered great white shark of carbon credits by actually giving them away.
It's gonna give away carbon credits, which again, like the bill don't exist.
Carbon credit is like a meaningless invented thing, but they will now say to uh preferred Democratic Party clients, you can carry on uh you can carry on polluting, and we're gonna present you with this handsome frame carbon credit, like Sheila Jackson Lee during the congressional resolution she read out of the Michael Jackson Memorial Service.
We're gonna give you this uh handsomely framed memorial carbon credit that will enable preferred Democratic Party clients to carry on polluting as much as they want.
Uh this is this is not gonna do anything to save the planet, uh, but it is gonna do an awful lot uh to destroy the uh American economy.
Uh we're gonna talk about that and we're gonna talk about funding health care uh straight ahead.
But I did want to go back to Neil in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Neil, you were telling us you were uh essentially a recovering liberal.
That's right, and you were and you were led over to the dark side.
Is that uh that that was it?
That's exactly right, uh Mark.
Tragic College, my friend Matt uh was I I back then I didn't know the difference between liberal and conservative.
It that that distinction just never occurred to me.
I had certain viewpoints that I now recognize as as as liberal.
And I didn't wasn't really didn't really know where I got them.
I just got them.
And I that's what I that's what I thought.
And I got tired.
You weren't to college with Barack Obama, were you?
No, no, no, no, no.
But I was I was going to a liberal arts college if that if that makes any difference to you.
Anyway, I got tired of losing arguments with my friend Matt.
And so I started I knew that he listened to Rush Limbaugh, and so I started listening to it.
And initially I was I was disagreeing with his viewpoints, but I couldn't I had no facts to back it up.
And he had facts, and when I started to investigate his facts, I started to realize, wait a second, okay, um it this is starting to make sense.
And then the crystal the magic light went off in my head when I actually graduated from college and got a job and saw how much money was being taken out of my check, and then the job that I had was working for a lot of municipalities, and I saw a lot of how decisions were being made in government, and then it really started to click.
But the reason what prompted me to call, though, Mark, was your your previous caller talking about the GM plant closing in Ohio.
And it and it occurred to me, um one of the the fundamental distinction between what either side is talking about with this whole recession, is there's certain facts about the economy that are incontrovertible.
You can't there's there's no there's no actually when you look at it, they are black and white about how economics works, how money flows, how job creation goes.
And there's one side in this debate that will tell you, give me power, give me the authority to do these things, and I will fix it for you.
You have pain, I will ease your pain.
I will make it better.
The other side is saying, here's the reality, we need to get out of the way.
But the public what's more palatable to the public, especially with all the populist rhetoric that's been led and the charter has been led on this by Barack Obama, what's more palatable to the public in general is I will fix your pain for you.
I feel your pain, I will fix it.
And in this case, with the with an economic situation like we have like we are, I mean, in in general it doesn't work, but especially in this dire of a circumstances we are, it just doesn't work.
So one party is telling one party's telling you the truth, but the people don't want to hear it.
No, you're you're right.
It uh essentially they're essentially the uh Obama administration is saying we can make the bad stuff go away.
We can make the grown-up stuff go away, so you won't have to think about this anymore.
Uh and that is a potent message for as long as it lasts.
Uh and if you can get away with it long enough, you can change the facts on the ground so that the government has taken over so much control of the economy that you can never go back.
Uh this is why things like cap and trade and health care are important.
Nobody's ever tried cap and trade on this scale before, so we don't know uh how uh uh cosmic a disaster that will be.
Uh but uh health care, uh we do know that health care is a is a total game changer and an irreversible game changer.
And if you uh and if you uh accept the principle of health care uh of government health care, uh, which is a very basic one, it essentially licenses the government to annex large parts of the economy uh and large parts of your personal liberty uh to it.
It it amounts in some way when you listen to some of the horror stories out of uh Canada and Britain and other places, what they are effectively uh confirming is that the state is nationalizing your body.
It's like uh when I was here a couple of weeks ago and I was talking about these incontinent uh Quebecers who are going to the uh toilet in Montreal twelve times a night, they're going to the bathroom twelve times a night, and the government of Quebec says you've got to wait three years for a simple half hour procedure.
Why?
Why?
A government bureaucrat has decided that.
He's decided that you have to go to the bathroom twelve times a night, uh seven nights a week, fifty-two weeks a year for three years, because he's the government and he has nationalized your bladder.
Your bladder is a wholly owned subsidiary of the government under that system.
Uh so he has the right to regulate how many times you go to the bathroom every night.
That's the es that's the essence of it.
And that's why once you've accepted that principle, it's very easy for then for people to accept.
I mean, after all, that's about as basic as anything.
If the guy if the guy says, Well, you know, I'm the deputy assistant under secretary of whatever at the Department of Health, and uh we've just looked into your case and we've decided you've got to go to the bathroom twelve times a night uh until uh the end of twenty twelve, uh and I'm a government bureaucrat and I can do that.
Once you accept the principle the government has the right to do that to you, uh it's very easy to get people to accept the principle that can control all kinds of other areas of your life.
Uh and that's really the danger of uh health care.
And uh and uh health care really isn't about outcomes, because generally speaking, when you look at uh life expectancy in most countries, they all it's it's all margin of error stuff.
Uh it all comes out, it's pretty much a wash, makes no difference.
Uh what is the difference is in terms of uh quality of life and personal liberty.
If you want to wait twelve uh three years with your legs crossed, that's up to you.
Uh but if you happen to think that you should have the right to decide when you get that half hour, simple half hour procedure, uh then government health care uh represents a fundamental assault on individual liberty.
It is the nationalization in that sense, it is the nationalization of uh of your body.
Uh now they want to do this health care thing in in five weeks.
Five weeks.
Uh they want to uh take a transformative action and do it in five weeks.
Uh there's no there's no way you can uh uh uh do uh what would uh uh governmentalize a huge chunk of the American economy uh in five weeks uh and it not to have disastrous consequences.
And the con the the but the most important consequence is the impact that it will have on individual liberty.
Uh It won't do anything to how long you will live.
If you if you if you're gonna live uh till you're 102, you'll still live to 102.
Uh if you were gonna keel over from a a massive heart attack at the age of uh 43, you'll still keel over from a massive heart heart attack at the age of 43.
Uh government health care isn't gonna change the outcomes uh significantly.
But what it will do is it will redefine the relationship uh between the citizen and the state in ways that I I think are basically uh incompatible with uh American ideas of of liberty.
I mean, we are essentially what what is what is puzzling to me about the health care debate is we're basically arguing about nothing.
We're arguing about uh uh about a problem which does not uh exist for the most part.
Uh if you think I I get these emails from people saying, oh, well, we're killing too many people.
The American system kills too many people.
Well, how come that doesn't show up in the numbers?
You know, life expectancy in the United States is 78.06 years.
Life expectancy in the European Union is 78.7 years.
So that's uh exciting.
They they get an extra, what's that, an extra six months?
But look, life expectancy in Albania, Albania, uh, which was which uh uh uh had didn't just have Stalinism, it had eco-style eco-Stalinism.
It had an Al Gore version of Stalinism, uh, where this guy, dictator, the dictator Enver Hodger, he was the only one who had the car.
Nobody else, everyone else, there was it was like the Al Gore utopia, Al Gore's Kyoto Treaty done to the nth degree.
That was eco-Stalinism in Albania.
You want health care, you've got to swim to Italy.
That's the healthcare system.
Nevertheless, Albania has life expectancy of 77.6 years.
Life expectancy in Libya, Libya, 76.88 years.
That's great, isn't it?
Life expectancy in Bosnia, 78.17 years.
Bosnia.
Now that's now so you can you've got different models here.
If you wanted to, if you wanted to get our life expectancy up to that extra six months that they have in the European Union, you could introduce massive socialized health care.
But if you just want to get another six weeks of life like they have in Bosnia, uh you could uh you could have uh reduce the entire country to rubble in an orgy of genocidal ethnic bloodletting, which has done wonders for Bosnian longevity.
I mean, basically, there is no there is no difference to the outcomes in any of these things.
Every country that's got childhood mortality under control and uh has hospitals where they, as we discussed last time round, when we were talking about those uh uh the chlamydia outbreak in Labrador spread by the shared spatula, uh as long as you run the spatula under the sink, you will you will live your three-score and ten and uh and get a couple of years bonus on the end of it.
And it's all margin of area territory.
There is no problem to solve.
So needless to say, they are going to make everything more expensive, more bureaucratic, and more complicated, because in the end it's not about health care, it's about the government annexation of life.
And think of that poor guy in Montreal with his legs crossed for three years.
That is what government health care is gonna do to you.
Keep your legs crossed for three years because a government bureaucrat says so.
This is uh Rush uh Limbo Show, Mark Stein City Inforush.
We'll have lots more straight ahead.
1800-282-2882.
We go Wednesday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein sitting in for rush.
Uh it's all Mark Week.
Mark Belling was here on uh yesterday, Mark Davis is uh was here on Friday, and uh I think Mark Sanford's gonna be here on Monday.
Is that what Mark Sanford's doing it live from his uh Rio de Janeiro uh love nest.
Uh he's gonna be tearing up a lot.
You know what you don't wanna you don't want to miss that.
The uh Mark Sanford, just the latest in the uh all mark guest host lineup uh here at the EIB network.
Uh talk about health care.
This is a story from today's Globe and Mail in Canada.
The head of Toronto's paramedics union was arrested after a stolen ambulance was found abandoned downtown in the middle of the night with a Union poster taped to it and the emergency lights flashing.
The theft occurred during the same week uh that the uh union leader, Mr. Fontaine issued a threat to withdraw the services of paramedics during gay pride festivities on the last weekend of June.
This is what you're in for on the socialized health care.
You won't be able to get an ambulance during uh gay pride week.
You know, and that's uh that's a serious issue.
If you're in uh if you fall off the float at the gay pride parade, you know, and if you've seen the gay pride parade, you'll know that a lot of those outfits you don't want to have an accident in.
I mean if you're like uh one of those fellas uh wearing the uh you know the uh just like in the the the the slightly the thong in the size two sizes too small, you fall off the float and you graze yourself with I mean it might if you're like wearing a plaid coat, you won't feel a thing.
Maybe you fall off the float and you're just wearing a thong, that could really that could really hurt.
Um, on the other hand, if you uh I guess if you do ever call 911, uh you know the first thing the paramedics do is they loosen all your clothing.
So I guess if you're wearing a thorn you're already there or in the uh or you're wearing like the tight leather shorts with the cutaway buttocks, they don't have to cut anything away, do you?
Uh but the but the point I've got all distracted now.
Anyway, the thing is if you're in Toronto and you fall off the float at the gay pride parade, uh don't call 911, uh go to the picket line and ask the st striking ambulance driver if you could borrow his stolen ambulance uh, you know, drive yourself to Toronto General Hospital.
These are the scenarios you have to anticipate under a socialized uh health care health care system.
Uh let's uh let's go to Dawn in uh Cleveland.
Uh Dawn, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to have you with us.
Thanks, Mr. Sign Stein.
Nice speaking with you.
I I guess I'm really upset because I'm probably one of everything you're talking about.
We're from uh from the Cleveland area.
The economy is very depressed.
My husband hasn't had a job for a year.
I used to be a stay-at-home mom.
I'm now a displaced homemaker looking for work.
But when you speak about um health care, I did work for a managed care facility for thirteen years, and they're a very large organization across the United States.
Um, everything is done by the dollar.
Let me tell you that.
Make no mistake.
They they account for everything.
And you have to use their facilities.
So I guess my first question is is how will they deliver services to people and exactly where will they deliver it?
Because in a managed care uh scenario, you have to actually go to one of their facilities.
You can't go outside the network.
Right when they couldn't handle it.
And if it was a real serious situation, they sent you to a a private institution.
Yep.
And and that now you imagine that on a national scale, because for example, uh I mentioned uh these incontinent Quebecers.
If you get if you're diagnosed with cancer in Quebec, you sit and wait and wait and wait and wait for treatment, and then eventually, uh just as it's metastasized and spread throughout your entire body, uh they will send you down to uh Fletcher Allen hospital in Burlington, Vermont, or Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
That's the safety valve for the government system.
Uh when you when you have a system that's all directed by the government, there is no safety valve uh unless you uh if you don't have a neighboring uh private system in a in a foreign country.
So I don't know the answer to that, whether it's well there's two there's three other quick points.
We used to get the physicians who either were knocked off of their um medical mal insurance or the ones who couldn't afford it.
So if you didn't know the network and who to go to, you were at risk with your own life.
Plus they had union employees and I was an IT, so I was sent to re ch retrain people because they were rude on the phone.
They couldn't fire them.
So exactly who do you want speaking to your loved one when they have cancer and and uh you know that you somebody hangs up on them or treats them rudely.
Also they went to call centers, and this is my main issue.
They went to a call center.
They were actually rewarded for trying to talk people out of going to the emergency room or to uh that same day appointment.
And then they actually got um you know, tru in trouble for that and and had to, you know, pay people money and all that kind of stuff.
But you know, I ended up having a friend who lost her baby and by virtue of that fact.
But but you you're but but but Dawn, that's absolutely the central point.
Those call center uh people trying to talk people out of using the system uh is what the bureaucratic sist government system boils down to.
It's like in Britain where they have this thing where you're supposed to be seen.
They set targets for the amount of time you are meant to be seen by the time you're dropped off at the emergency room and by the time you're seeing a doctor.
What happened in practice was that instead the ambulances were all told to sit in the parking lot and idle with their engines running to avoid dropping you off at the door to the emergency room.
So technically they would still meet their targets because instead of spending hours sitting around the emergency room, you'd spend hours sitting around in the ambulance in the parking lot.
And meanwhile, somebody who's trying to dial 911 can't get an ambulance because the ambulance is wasting its time idling in the parking lot.
The only way you can control costs in a government system is by imposing a giant bureaucracy between you and the doctor and restricting your access to that medical care.
And that is what happens.
We're talking about health care on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
1-800-282-2882.
Hey, great to be with you.
Everyone's a critic.
Brian just emailed me to say that he was surprised when we were talking about Uyghurs and Michael Jackson that I missed the opportunity to combine the two stories and sing Uyghur the world, Uyghur the children.
And thanks very much, Brian.
You got it wrong, though.
The one that they should be doing is Because this is Uyghur, Uyghur night And no one's going to save you from that beast about to strike.
the Michael Jackson Uyghur number that's the that's uh we we got the Uyghur fever every every Wednesday if I if I happen to be guest hosting it's weigher fever day on the EIB network.
But uh but that's the song to do.
We gun Uyghur night.
And uh no one's gonna save you from the beast about to strike.
The Han, who previously had the upper hand in Western China are learning that lesson the hard way.
Let's go to Rob in Long Island.
Uh Rob, we're talking about uh Long Island, New York that is not uh Long Island in Western China or anywhere else they must say the Long Island somewhere else in the world.
But Rob Long Island, New York, we're talking about Uyghurs.
Uh no we're talking about health care I have got the I don't you've got to make it easy Mark.
Yeah I got that the the Uyghur fever really is getting to be okay if you want to make a point about Uyghurs you can but we're supposed to be talking about healthcare.
Great to have you with us, Rob.
Uh thank you Mark I you know I want to tell my uh fellow Americans that I love my country and I'm seeing what's going on and I there's a couple of points put on the table that it's not being talked about at all in this whole project to spend more money in a time right now where we've lost a cataclysmic amount of wealth and uh a banking crisis that uh I'm doing health care in Long Island since nineteen eighty nine before the AIDS epidemic and before we had community rating here in New York.
Couple of pressing points though that we hit now in in in in two thousand and nine these dollar one plans have gone up over four hundred percent since about nineteen ninety four.
Right.
Because in truth the reality is is that as long as you had new business in New York to keep riding you could artificially keep the rates down.
But in this whole context of healthcare discussion, they're not talking about how to create empowering individuals to be personally involved in their own health number one we know in New York State you've got 8000 diabetics, one out of four adults in this country is obese, one out of three kids is obese, and that as someone who's doing this as well as having had need myself, I challenge you to find out how many of the high end neurosurgeons who are paying so you're a 43 year old neurosurgeon right?
Right.
You're paying off three hundred thousand dollars in your medical school bills you now have an annual payment of two hundred and seventy thousand dollars for malpractice premium.
I challenge you to find out some of these high end guys in New York City or even in Nassau County what networks they're taking on now.
Do you think they're gonna take a government plan as well?
Forget about it.
No you're in New York in New York State I just want to finish my point if if I may um you have these mandated benefit laws that came in in context to these HMOs where everything was dollar one.
Right.
The actuaries of these insurance companies and these dollar one plans have got to solve for all these various benefits that truth be told like car insurance there's certain things you should just pay for as you need acupuncture, psychotherapy forms of psychotherapy, durable medical equipment and that you've got to create a model that follows there was a study at at um Mount Sinai cardiology department said for a given your for a given ten year period of time.
If you don't smoke, you watch your weight, you watch your blood pressure, you watch your cholesterol, you've lowered uh you've lowered your risk of a heart attack over a given ten year period of time by ninety-nine percent.
And before we go out and spend a ton of more money right now, I'm seeing in the economy here we're having in NASA County we lost twice up to 7,000 jobs in one year.
We lost 467,000 jobs last month, we're losing four to five hundred a month.
That there's no way that to add another program right now that would get America can afford it.
No, you want to add, you know, I'm also a writer.
I submitted an application form at the Library of Congress for a copyright form.
I sent it last October.
I can't get a response yet.
Well, that's that's a fairly that's a fairly difficult time frame in getting a response from government.
But Rob, I just want to go back.
You made the central point here that uh that uh a lot of these things are simpler if you pay as you go.
And and when people talk about rising health care costs, and you ask them to pin them down, nobody can put a price anymore on what it costs you to go uh let's say you've got a bit of back pain and you go to see a doctor and he tells you uh what's the matter with your back and gives you something to put on your back.
Nobody knows what that costs now.
Nobody can put a dollar figure on that, uh, because we have essentially uh put so many other factors in uh between the doctor-patient relationship.
And that is that is one of the issues here, that we're no longer comparing a private system with a government system, a government monopoly, such as they have in Canada, uh where combining a deeply distorted system uh in which we're looking to w when they have these uh like uh little sob sister stories uh coming up in the cable TV ads where someone's saying, I'm so worried about health care costs.
If you're worried about health care costs, why not look at an itemized bill?
Uh ask for an itemized bill next time you're in a hospital, and actually try and look at what co what it's costing, and then figure out, then look at the uh uninsured discount you would get if you just wrote a check for it.
Uh and then think about maybe uh m uh maybe a system in which we don't try to insure against the inevitable, we don't try to insure against the routine uh as we do uh in any other area of life.
I mean, uh we generally speaking we insure against things that are unlikely to happen.
You know, your your car is unlikely to flip over on the interstate and burst into flames, but when it does, uh you want to have made provision for that.
There's no point trying to insure against things you're gonna get, uh you're gonna need, you're gonna get anyway, like a routine visit to the doctor or a routine uh prescription of pills.
And that's why the cheapest way, uh you you you're if you put insurance in the middle of that, if you put uh blue cross, blue shield, HMO, whatever you want to call it, if you put any a complicating third party between the patient and the doctor, you're gonna add to the cost of that simple transaction.
If you put the government between them, so they then you're gonna explode the cost because there will no longer be a rational market price for any of those services.
Uh that's why for routine things like, oh, I I woke up and I felt a bit funny today, so I called the doctor, so I'm gonna go and see him at 1030.
You should write a check for that.
That's the cheapest way, that's the bargain way.
Uh and that's what Americans used to do.
And when Americans used to just uh go and see the doctor, or he'd come and see you and you wrote a check for it, you didn't get into this, uh you didn't get into this idea of a health system uh for three hundred million people that only a genius like Barack Obama aided by Barney Frankenco can possibly devise.
Uh that is that is the uh the the problem with uh with looking at it in those terms.
Let's go to Graham, who's in Seattle.
Graham, it's great to have you with us on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Yeah, hi.
Um I just uh firstly, my uh I have a father in England who's been quite sick and gone through the system, and I I don't think it's totally as bad as you make out, but my meta point Oh, I just uh while we're competing on fathers.
My father's sick in a British public hospital at the moment.
He was at the first hospital, he was infected with C. diffusile.
At the s uh so they uh the next time they took him to another hospital, he got infected with MERSA, this other thing, and the third hospital, which is the one he's in now, he's in f he got infected with septicemia.
So he's got the national British National Health Service jackpot infected, he didn't go in for any of those things.
They're what the hospital gave him, C. difficile, MERSA, and septicemia.
Uh but you know, the great thing is he didn't have to pay for them.
So he's been he's been infected for free.
Uh carry on Gram.
Yeah, my bigger point is um there was uh a paper written by the CEO of Medco Health um talking about why American health care costs twice the GDP as it does in any of those countries, despite the fact that the the expected life or the life expectancy is the same.
Right.
Also that um equipment in US hospitals is on average twice as old as it is in European hospitals under socialized health care.
And the third element of that is I think the previous caller talked about it, which was there's just no focus on prevention.
So my my uh my issue here is that it's not about socialized medicine versus private health care.
Both of them have failed horribly.
And what I'd like to have choice, I also think it's a travesty that 50 million people are can't get access to any health care at all.
Well well, no, no, no.
Let's let's let's run let's run through that last point.
Uh because when you when you actually break down those figures of who is uninsured, uh fifty million.
The the uh Census Bureau uh looked into this and the Department of Health and uh Human Services a couple of years ago, and they found out that twenty percent of those people uh for start are uh are uh i illegal immigrants.
So uh ten million of those people are people who shouldn't be in the country anyway.
No b no medical system can insure everybody on the planet.
Uh you can't devise that.
Uh uh another another uh uh another uh twenty uh percent, another nine million people, uh were people who were entitled to coverage under Medicare, but for whatever reason had not signed up for it.
So they are actually are insured, but they're either unaware they're insured or they're just choosing not to take advantage of it.
And interestingly, the m dominant group in that group uh were young, healthy people uh uh who who uh uh uh move from job to job and for whom, you know, you're 22, life's a party, you're gonna live forever.
Uh okay, you don't have health insurance, but you don't have uh you don't have home insurance either.
You're not at that stage of life where you're thinking of insuring against disaster because you're young and optimistic.
And then the fastest growing group is people who own uh earn over 75,000 dollars a year, what I was talking about earlier, people who have figured out that a lot of the insurance schemes uh are actually uh a racket, and if you can afford to pay as you go, then uh as long as you don't get anything uh chronic and catastrophic, uh that's the cheapest way to do it.
They're actually wealthy people who write who when they need uh the services uh of the uh uh uh of the medical system write a check as they go.
So that idea that there's fifty million people and that they're an unfixed pool uh and that they just uh uh the first person uh d to to be without medical insurance is a veteran of the Spanish American war, and he and he signed up and then uh Auntie Mabel uh put her back out doing the Charleston in 1923 and she joined, and then uh one way or another it all adds up, and now there's fifty million people who are it's not.
It's a shifting pool, most of whom are made up of uh young people uh moving from job to job and uh uh and wealthy people earning over seventy-five thousand a year.
This idea of a fixed pool of people for whom there is no medical treatment is completely false, Graham.
The costs and also the fact that in the American system it's not actually your doctor that determines your treatment, it's actually your insurer and the PBM, who have the right to change medic medical treatment based on based on whatever they decide is right.
Yeah, and that's why, as I say, this is a liberty issue.
You say that all systems are bad.
And you're right, they're they're all bad because we're all gonna die.
And in any system, uh and in any system, some people are gonna die horrible deaths, and and the lousy guy who lives next door to you uh who treated you horribly and and is one of the lowest forms of life on the planet is gonna have a great life and live to 110.
Life is full of injustice.
Uh so health a health system will be full of injustice.
But the point the point here, Graham, uh even when you've got an insurance uh plan uh or uh you you've got uh uh some kind of employer coverage that only does this, only does that.
In a free society, you're free to say, nuts to this, I'm getting something else.
And if you look at at government systems, government systems, if you look in Canada, uh that's the point.
In Canada, you can't do anything else.
In Canada, when the bureaucrat says you gotta you've got to go to the bathroom twelve times a night for three years, that's it.
There's no way you can go in that guy's jurisdiction and get any kind of alternative treatments.
If you believe in individual liberty, then an unjust, unfair private system will always be better than an unjust, unfair government system.
And that's uh that's that's the in the end, uh we'll live what we live for the most part.
Uh some people will get something that'll be detected, and other people will get something and they won't be detected.
Uh and that'll all be a wash.
In the in the big picture, if you think of yourself as a statistic, then by uh uh we we'll all uh life expectancy will all still come out the same.
But what matters is having the right to choose as a free-born citizen what you do with your body, and that is the right uh that government systems take away from you.
Mark Stein sitting in for rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Uh great to have you with us.
Lots more straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
I just wanted to go through those figures, because they are actually important.
This uh couple of years ago, 45 million uninsured.
This was uh uh what they came uh came up with.
And uh of those figures, uh nine million uninsured 45 million uninsured Americans, nine million of them aren't uh Americans, nine million of them aren't uninsured, uh nine million of them earn uh over seventy-five thousand dollars a year and have chosen to opt out of the system, and the remaining eighteen million of them are young people, eighteen to thirty-four, uh, who have chosen to uh be mobile and aren't thinking about that stuff in there.
There is not a problem of 45 million uh here.
Uh that's just uh the government pretext for government annexation of your life.
Uh let's go to Jennifer in Portland.
Jennifer, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to have you with us.
Thank you for taking my call.
Um I'm a paramedic in Portland, Oregon in the 911 system, and um it's it's a moderate-sized city.
And we have uh socialized medicine through the Oregon Health Plan.
And then of course the the Medicare coverage.
And one thing that a lot of people don't talk about um is the abuses that the system or that the patients put onto the system uh themselves, especially when their health care is provided for free.
Um I've uh responded code three, um, you know, lights and sirens for a 911 call for a woman with the yeast infection that she wanted to be transported by ambulance to the hospital for geriatric patients.
No, no, Jennifer Jennifer, with a yeast infection, you really need helicopter rescue either.
Um, just people that need like they have uh geriatric patient that has high blood pressure that needs to be treated.
They don't want to wait in the emergency room.
They call 911 so they can be transported by ambulance, so they don't have to wait.
Uh that that's a great great point, Jennifer.
We're gonna have to uh uh run, but it is a great point to end on because that's that's what happens actually when you have a uh a government system is if you go uh if you go along to the doctor, you'll discover that a lot of people are actually uh wind up using the emergency room uh as a uh uh as a substitute for treatment that they can't get uh at uh when they sit around the waiting rooms, because that's too long.
So if you think it's bad now, there's gonna be a lot more of that uh under a government system.
Uh this is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Rush will be back on uh on Monday.
This health care thing is winnable, folks.
Fifty-nine percent of people are opposed to taxing health care benefits to quote, pay for reform.
That's according to the Associated Press.
Uh Democrats are having second thoughts on taxing your health benefits to quote uh reform the system.
Uh in other words, you'll be paying th this idea that we're gonna save money for this.
No, we're not.
Whatever you're paying now, you're gonna be paying more because you'll be paying for you, plus you'll be paying for the so-called fifty million uninsured, plus you'll be paying for a huge administrative federal bureaucracy.
There are no savings to be made here.
Uh I've had a great time uh these last three hours.
Looking forward to joining you tomorrow.
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