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July 8, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:51
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, I'm not one of these people like these Uyghurs.
I don't get the upgraded to the Bermudan Beach Resort.
Instead, they just ship me down to New York, and I got to do this show.
But it's a great honor to be here.
Mark Davis will be here Friday, and then Rush returns on Monday.
We're going to return to Neil in Lafayette, Louisiana in a minute, because we just want to finish up with what we were talking about there.
But you know, before we move on from this cap and trade business, one of the most ridiculous things about this is this marks a new low in the whole phoniness of the climate change thing.
You know, these carbon credits that you trade back and forth and supposedly enable you to carry on polluting.
And in return, a terrorist mastermind living at the back of a smelly cave in Waziristan, he agrees not to use his cell phone because every time he does do it, the Pentagon launch a missile at his cave.
So he agrees to downgrade his carbon footprint.
And in return, you get to go and pollute a bit more.
That whole thing was ridiculous anyway, this carbon credit, trading carbon credits.
But Congress has made it, managed to do effectively the jumping of the endangered great white shark of carbon credits by actually giving them away.
It's going to 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 preferred Democratic Party clients, you can carry on polluting, and we're going to present you with this handsome framed carbon credit, like Sheila Jackson Lee doing the congressional resolution she read out of the Michael Jackson Memorial Service.
We're going to give you this handsomely framed memorial carbon credit that will enable preferred Democratic Party clients to carry on polluting as much as they want.
This is not going to do anything to save the planet, but it is going to do an awful lot to destroy the American economy.
We're going to talk about that and we're going to talk about funding health care straight ahead.
But I did want to go back to Neil in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Neil, you were telling us you were essentially a recovering liberal.
That's right.
And you were led over to the dark side.
Is that it?
That's exactly right, Mark.
Dr. College, my friend Matt, was back then I didn't know the difference between liberal and conservative.
That distinction just never occurred to me.
I had certain viewpoints that I now recognize as liberal.
And I didn't really know where I got them.
I just got them.
And that's what I thought.
And I got tired.
You weren't at college with Barack Obama, were you?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
But I was going to a liberal arts college, 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 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, this is starting to make sense.
And then 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 previous caller talking about the GM plant closing in Ohio.
And it occurred to me, 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 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 what's more palatable to the public, especially with all the populist rhetoric that's been led in 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 an economic situation like we are, I mean, in general, it doesn't work, but especially in as dire of a circumstance as we are, it just doesn't work.
So one party is telling you the truth, but the people don't want to hear it.
No, you're right.
Essentially, the 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.
And that is a potent message for as long as it lasts.
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.
This is why things like cap and trade and healthcare are important.
Nobody's ever tried cap and trade on this scale before, so we don't know how cosmic a disaster that will be.
But healthcare, we do know that healthcare is a total game changer and an irreversible game changer.
And if you accept the principle of healthcare, of government health care, which is a very basic one, it essentially licenses the government to annex large parts of the economy and large parts of your personal liberty to it.
It amounts in some way.
When you listen to some of the horror stories out of Canada and Britain and other places, what they are effectively confirming is that the state is nationalizing your body.
It's like when I was here a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about these incontinent Quebecers who are going to the toilet in Montreal 12 times a night.
They're going to the bathroom 12 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 12 times a night, seven nights a week, 52 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.
So he has the right to regulate how many times you go to the bathroom every night.
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 says, well, you know, I'm the deputy assistant undersecretary of whatever at the Department of Health, and we've just looked into your case, and we've decided you've got to go to the bathroom 12 times a night until the end of 2012, 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, it's very easy to get people to accept the principle that can control all kinds of other areas of your life.
And that's really the danger of healthcare.
And healthcare really isn't about outcomes.
Because generally speaking, when you look at life expectancy in most countries, it's all margin of error stuff.
It all comes out pretty much awash.
Makes no difference.
What is the difference is in terms of quality of life and personal liberty.
If you want to wait three years with your legs crossed, that's up to you.
But if you happen to think that you should have the right to decide when you get that half-hour, simple half-hour procedure, then government healthcare represents a fundamental assault on individual liberty.
It is the nationalization, in that sense, it is the nationalization of your body.
Now, they want to do this healthcare thing in five weeks.
Five weeks.
They want to take a transformative action and do it in five weeks.
There's no way you can do what would governmentalize a huge chunk of the American economy in five weeks and it not to have disastrous consequences.
And the most important consequence is the impact that it will have on individual liberty.
It won't do anything to how long you will live.
If you're going to live till you're 102, you'll still live to 102.
If you were going to keel over from a massive heart attack at the age of 43, you'll still keel over from a massive heart attack at the age of 43.
Government healthcare isn't going to change the outcomes significantly.
But what it will do is it will redefine the relationship between the citizen and the state in ways that I think are basically incompatible with American ideas of liberty.
I mean, we are essentially, what is puzzling me about the healthcare debate is we're basically arguing about nothing.
We're arguing about a problem which does not exist for the most part.
If you think, I get these emails from people saying, oh, well, we're killing too many people.
The American system kills too many people.
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 exciting.
They get an extra, what's that, an extra six months?
Look, life expectancy in Albania, Albania, which had didn't just have Stalinism, it had eco-Stalinism.
It had an Al Gore version of Stalinism, where this guy dictator, the dictator Enver Hodger, he was the only one who had the car.
Nobody else, everyone else, 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 healthcare, 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've got different models here.
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 healthcare.
But if you just want to get another six weeks of life like they have in Bosnia, you could have reduced 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 difference to the outcomes in any of these things.
Every country that's got childhood mortality under control and has hospitals where they, as we discussed last time round, when we were talking about those, the chlamydia outbreak in Labrador spread by the shared spatula.
As long as you run the spatula under the sink, you will live your three score and ten 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 healthcare.
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 healthcare is going to do to you.
Keep your legs crossed for three years because a government bureaucrat says so.
This is Rush Limbaugh Show, Mark Stein City.
Infra Rush.
We'll have lots more straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
We go Wednesday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
It's all Mark Week.
Mark Belling was here yesterday.
Mark Davis was here on Friday.
And I think Mark Sanford's going to be here on Monday.
Is that what Mark Sanford's doing it live from his Rio de Janeiro Lovenest?
He's going to be tearing up a lot.
You don't want to miss that.
Mark Sanford, just the latest in the all-mark guest host lineup here at the EIB network.
Talking about healthcare.
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 that the 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 under socialized healthcare.
You won't be able to get an ambulance during Gay Pride Week.
You know, and that's a serious issue.
If you're in, 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 one of those fellas wearing the, you know, the, just like in the slightly, the thong in the size two sizes too small, you fall off the float and you graze yourself.
I mean, if you're like wearing a plaid coat, you won't feel a thing.
But if you fall off the float and you're just wearing a thong, that could really hurt.
You know, on the other hand, if you, I guess if you do ever call 911, you know, the first thing the paramedics do is they loosen all your clothing.
So I guess if you're wearing a thong, you're already there.
Or you're wearing like the tight leather shorts with the cutaway buttocks.
They don't have to cut anything away, do you?
But the point, I've got a little distracted now.
Anyway, the thing is, if you're in Toronto and you fall off the float at the Gay Pride Parade, don't call 911.
Go to the picket line and ask the striking ambulance driver if you could borrow his stolen ambulance.
You know, drive yourself to Toronto General Hospital.
These are the scenarios you have to anticipate under a socialized healthcare system.
Let's go to Dawn in Cleveland.
Dawn, you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Thanks, Mr. Sign.
Nice speaking with you.
I guess I'm really upset because I'm probably one of everything you're talking about.
We're 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 healthcare, I did work for a managed care facility for 13 years.
And they're a very large organization across the United States.
Everything is done by the dollar.
Let me tell you that.
Make no mistake.
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 scenario, you have to actually go to one of their facilities.
You can't go outside the network.
When they couldn't handle it, and if it was a real serious situation, they sent you to a private institution.
Yep, and that now you imagine that on a national scale because, for example, I mentioned these incontinent Quebecers.
If you're diagnosed with cancer in Quebec, you sit and wait and wait and wait and wait for treatment.
And then eventually, just as it's metastasized and spread throughout your entire body, they will send you down to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington, Vermont, or Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
That's the safety valve for the government system.
When you have a system that's all directed by the government, there is no safety valve unless you don't have a neighboring private system in a foreign country.
So I don't know the answer to that.
Well, there's three other quick points.
We used to get the physicians who either were knocked off of their medical malinsurance 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 in IT, so I was sent to 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 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 a same-day appointment.
And then they actually got in trouble for that and had to pay people money and all that kind of stuff.
But I ended up having a friend who lost her baby by virtue of that fact.
But Dawn, that's absolutely the central point.
Those call center people trying to talk people out of using the system is what the bureaucratic 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 of 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 while 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 healthcare 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.
It's 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.
That's the Michael Jackson Uyghur number.
That is actually that we got the Uyghur fever every Wednesday.
If I if I happen to be guest hosting, it's Uyghur Fever Day on the EIB network.
But that's the song to do.
Uyghur, Uyghur night.
And no one's going to 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.
Rob, we're talking about Long Island, New York.
That is, not Long Island in Western China or anywhere else.
They must have a Long Island somewhere else in the world.
But Rob, Long Island, New York.
We're talking about Uyghurs.
No, we're talking about healthcare.
I have got the.
You've got to.
Make it easy, Mark.
Yeah, I got that.
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.
Thank you, Mark.
You know, I want to tell my fellow Americans that I love my country and I'm seeing what's going on.
And I just take a couple of points to 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 a banking crisis.
That I'm doing healthcare in Long Island since 1989, before the AIDS epidemic and before we had community rating here in New York.
A couple of pressing points, though, that we hit now in 2009.
These dollar one plans have gone up over 400% since about 1994.
Right.
Because in truth, the reality is that as long as you had new business in New York to keep writing, 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 800,000 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?
You're paying off $300,000 in your medical school bills.
You now have an annual payment of $270,000 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 going to take a government plan as well?
Forget about it.
No, you're.
In New York State, I just want to finish my point, if I may.
You have these mandated benefit laws that came in in context to these HMOs where everything was dollar one.
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 Mount Sinai, Cardiology Department, said for a given 10-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 your risk of a heart attack over a given 10-year period of time by 99%.
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 Nassau County, we lost 27,7,000 jobs in one year.
We lost 467,000 jobs last month.
We're losing $400,500 a month.
That there's no way that to add another program right now that America can afford this.
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 a fairly difficult timeframe in getting a response from government.
But Rob, I just want to go back.
You made the central point here that a lot of these things are simpler if you pay as you go.
And when people talk about rising health care costs, you ask them to pin them down.
Nobody can put a price anymore on what it costs you to go, let's say you've got a bit of back pain and you go to see a doctor and he tells you 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 because we have essentially put so many other factors in between the doctor-patient relationship.
And 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.
We're combining a deeply distorted system in which we're looking to, when they have these like little sob sister stories coming up in the cable TV ads where someone's saying, I'm so worried about healthcare costs.
If you're worried about healthcare costs, why not look at an itemized bill?
Ask for an itemized bill next time you're in a hospital and actually try and look at what it's costing and then figure out, then look at the uninsured discount you would get if you just wrote a check for it.
And then think about maybe a system in which we don't try to insure against the inevitable.
We don't try to insure against the routine as we do in any other area of life.
I mean, generally speaking, we insure against things that are unlikely to happen.
You know, your car is unlikely to flip over on the interstate and burst into flames.
But when it does, you want to have made provision for that.
There's no point trying to insure against things you're going to get, you're going to need, you're going to get anyway, like a routine visit to the doctor or a routine prescription of pills.
And that's why the cheapest way, if you put insurance in the middle of that, if you put Blue Cross, Blue Shield, HMO, whatever you want to call it, if you put any complicating third party between the patient and the doctor, you're going to add to the cost of that simple transaction.
If you put the government between them, then you're going to explode the costs because there will no longer be a rational market price for any of those services.
That's why for routine things like, oh, I woke up and I felt a bit funny today, so I called the doctor, so I'm going to go and see him at 10.30, you should write a check for that.
That's the cheapest way.
That's the bargain way.
And that's what Americans used to do.
And when Americans used to just 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.
You didn't get into this idea of a health system for 300 million people that only a genius like Barack Obama, aided by Barney Frank and Co., can possibly devise.
That is the problem 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.
Firstly, I have a father in England who's been quite sick and gone through the system.
and I don't think it's totally as bad as you make out, but my meta point is...
Oh, just while we're competing on fathers, my father's sick in a British public hospital at the moment.
At the first hospital, he was infected with C. difficile.
So the next time they took him to another hospital, he got infected with MRSA, this other thing.
And the third hospital, which is the one he's in now, he got infected with septicemia.
So he's got the 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, MRSA, and septicemia.
But, you know, the great thing is he didn't have to pay for them.
So he's been infected for free.
Carry on, Graham.
Yeah, my bigger point is there was a paper written by the CEO of MedcoHealth talking about why American healthcare costs twice the GDP as it does in any of those countries, despite the fact that the expected life or the life expectancy is the same.
Also, that equipment in U.S. hospitals is on average twice as old as it is in European hospitals under socialized healthcare.
And the third element of that is, I think the previous caller talked about it, which is there's just no focus on prevention.
So 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 can't get access to any health care at all.
Well, no, no, no.
Let's run through that last point.
Because when you actually break down those figures of who is uninsured, 50 million.
The Census Bureau looked into this and the Department of Health and Human Services a couple of years ago.
And they found out that 20% of those people for a start are illegal immigrants.
So 10 million of those people are people who shouldn't be in the country anyway.
No medical system can ensure everybody on the planet.
You can't devise that.
Another 20%, another 9 million people were people who were entitled to coverage under Medicare, but for whatever reason had not signed up for it.
So they 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 dominant group in that group were young, healthy people who move from job to job and for whom, you know, you're 22, life's a party, you're going to live forever.
Okay, you don't have health insurance, but 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 earn over $75,000 a year, what I was talking about earlier.
People who have figured out that a lot of the insurance schemes are actually a racket.
And if you can afford to pay as you go, then as long as you don't get anything chronic and catastrophic, that's the cheapest way to do it.
They're actually wealthy people who, when they need the services of the medical system, write a check as they go.
So that idea that there's 50 million people and that they're an unfixed pool and that they just the first person to be without medical insurance is a veteran of the Spanish-American War and he signed up, and then Auntie Mabel put her back out doing the Charleston in 1923 and she joined, and then, one way and another, it all adds up and now there's 50 million people who it's not.
It's a shifting pool, most of whom are made up of young people moving from job to job and and wealthy people earning over 75,000 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 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 all bad because we're all going to die.
And in any system, and in any system, some people are going to die horrible deaths.
And the lousy guy who lives next door to you, who treated you horribly and is one of the lowest forms of life on the planet, is going to have a great life and live to 110.
Life is full of injustice.
So a health system will be full of injustice.
But the point here, Graham, even when you've got an insurance plan or you've got 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 government systems, government systems, if you look in Canada, that's the point.
In Canada, you can't do anything else.
In Canada, when the bureaucrat says you've got to go to the bathroom 12 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 the, in the end, we'll live what we live for the most part.
Some people will get something that'll be detected, and other people will get something and they won't be detected.
And that'll all be a wash.
In the big picture, if you think of yourself as a statistic, then our life expectancy will all still come out the same.
But what matters is having the right to choose as a freeborn citizen what you do with your body.
And that is the right that government systems take away from you.
Mark Stein, sitting in for rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
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 a couple of years ago, 45 million uninsured.
This was what they came up with.
And of those figures, 45 million uninsured Americans, 9 million of them aren't Americans, 9 million of them aren't uninsured.
9 million of them earn over $75,000 a year and have chosen to opt out of the system.
And the remaining 18 million of them are young people 18 to 34 who have chosen to be mobile and aren't thinking about that stuff in there.
There is not a problem of 45 million here.
That's just the government pretext for government annexation of your life.
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.
I'm a paramedic in Portland, Oregon in the 911 system.
And it's a moderate-sized city.
And we have socialized medicine through the Oregon Health Plan.
And then, of course, the Medicare coverage.
And one thing that a lot of people don't talk about is the abuses that the system or that the patients put onto the system themselves, especially when their health care is provided for free.
I've responded code three, 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, with a yeast infection, you really need helicopter rescue.
It's a little fly flight at her, but you know.
You know, just people that need, like, they have a geriatric patient that has high blood pressure that needs to be treated.
They don't want to wait in the emergency room.
So they call 911 so they can be transported by ambulance so they don't have to wait.
That's a great point, Jennifer.
We're going to have to run, but it is a great point to end on because that's what happens actually when you have a government system.
Is If you go along to the doctor, you'll discover that a lot of people are actually wind up using the emergency room as a substitute for treatment that they can't get when they sit around the waiting rooms because that's too long.
So if you think it's bad now, there's going to be a lot more of that under a government system.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Rush will be back on Monday.
This healthcare thing is winnable, folks.
59% of people are opposed to taxing healthcare benefits to, quote, pay for reform.
That's according to the Associated Press.
Democrats are having second thoughts on taxing your health benefits to, quote, reform the system.
In other words, you'll be paying this idea that we're going to save money for this.
No, we're not.
Whatever you're paying now, you're going to be paying more because you'll be paying for you, plus you'll be paying for the so-called 50 million uninsured, plus you'll be paying for a huge administrative federal bureaucracy.
There are no savings to be made here.
I've had a great time these last three hours.
Looking forward to joining you tomorrow.
We go Wednesday.
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