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Jan. 6, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
January 6, 2010, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Boy, am I glad to be back.
And folks, have you noticed what happened?
My first day back, how many Democrats have now quit?
How many Democrats?
Five or six.
Five or six have said, no, mas, no mas.
And there will be more.
And we'll talk about that as the program unfolds today.
Great to have you with us.
Here's the telephone number, 800-282-2882.
It has not changed.
The email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
Really am glad to be back.
I want to tell you what happened out in Hawaii.
And it's amazing, too, that I had this little press conference out there right before I was released from the hospital.
And I made one statement.
There's nothing wrong with the American healthcare system.
And the whole state controlled media had a cow.
That personal attack on Obama.
When I said the whole healthcare system worked.
And then the drive-by started to say, wait a minute now.
Wait just a minute.
Limbaugh got caught here because Hawaii has the most progressive healthcare system in the country, meaning it's very liberal and so forth.
And so Limbaugh has inadvertently endorsed Obamacare and so forth.
So let me explain what happened and what I meant by the comment.
Now, before I left for two weeks prior to leaving for vacation, I had to do this program standing up.
Now, I think this is a relevant factor because of this really troublesome pinched nerve or whatever it is, herniated disc.
I don't know what it is.
All I know is it's C5 or C6 and it causes almost intolerable pain in my right shoulder, neck, and all the way down my right arm.
And sitting down made it worse.
So I had to do the program standing up.
And I was on, for those two weeks, oral prednisone or methylprednisolone, which is an anti-inflammatory steroid.
It's a great drug, but it's also a horrible drug.
It turns off the appetite control center.
The side effects to it are immense, and they differ from person to person.
But it was the only thing that shrunk whatever the inflammation is that then got rid of the pain.
It's a six-day course, and each dose is a lesser dose than the day before.
And as I get down to day three, and then day two, with the doses being smaller, the pain started coming back.
So I went back on another oral dose, which you don't want to be on this stuff long.
I was on it for two months when I lost my hearing.
They tried to, they threw everything at my hearing loss trying to save it.
And it gained 40 pounds in two months.
I just had no, I never ever felt full.
And I didn't want to stay on this stuff that long again for that reason because I just successfully lost 85 pounds and I vowed I wasn't going to put any of it back on.
So it was, I don't mean to complain here, folks, but it was agonizing.
This whole pinched nerve was literally agonizing.
I was sitting here doing this radio program with my right arm over my head like this.
If you're watching on the ditto cam, you can now see it.
It was just ungodly.
So we go over to Hawaii and we left on Christmas night, went to Minneapolis and then Cape Girardeau.
And on Christmas night, we arrived in Hawaii.
And the next day, Saturday, and the shoulder was just excruciating.
So called a doctor back here and asked him, can you find somebody?
The next step was to get a spinal epidural shot in the actual nerve rather than go back to the oral prednisone, methylprednisolone.
So I was going to do that.
We got back from Hawaii.
And on Saturday, it was just, you know, I'd run out of the methylprednisolone.
It was just, it was agony.
So I called the doctor here and can you find somebody out here to give me the spinal epidural?
I've got, I can't, I can't wait till we get back.
So we found somebody, a great doctor, who came to the hotel on Sunday to evaluate me, filled out all the forms, and couldn't do this until Tuesday, which, you know, a week ago yesterday.
So went into the hospital, Queen's Hospital, same one I went to when you found out I was there, at the same day surgery department.
And I had the spinal epidural at about eight o'clock in the morning and then flew over to Kona to play golf with some buddies immediately after that and had no reaction to it whatsoever.
The pain, you know, it takes a couple, three days for the steroid shot to take effect.
It was the next day, we got back from Kona that night, did not spend the night.
On Wednesday, got up, went to lunch with Catherine and her parents down at the hotel at the Kahala.
Everybody there was fantastic.
And I guess it was about 1 o'clock or 1.15, went back up to our room and Catherine and her mother went down to get their nails done at the spa.
And I'm sitting up in the room, always waiting for her to come back because we're going to go do some other things.
And I started getting real sleepy, started yawning like crazy.
And I started getting real thirsty.
And I poured a couple of glasses of water and sat down and started for the first time read a local paper.
And I started reading about the Friday furlough problem with teachers that they're having in Hawaii.
And all of a sudden, what wasn't all of a sudden, there was a slow build to a, and I've often wondered what a heart attack felt like.
You want to be prepared for it.
And I've never felt that.
And I hear people talk about chest pains all the time.
You start thinking about these things when your weight fluctuates and you're 59 years old, which I will be shortly.
So this pain started building my left armpit and left shoulder and the left side of the center of my chest.
And it just kept building and it was unlike any pain I'd ever felt before.
I'd never, and I said, this was not indigestion, even though I went and grabbed a couple of tums just to see if it was indigestion or that it wasn't that.
At least the tums didn't have any effect on it.
And after about 10 minutes of this, it just kept getting worse and worse.
And I was running around looking for an aspirin.
We didn't have any aspirin, but I've always heard take an aspirin.
Couldn't find any.
So finally, I never used the phone.
I hate the telephone because of my hearing.
It's impossible for me to talk to people on cell phone.
So I usually text people.
So I texted Catherine and I said, I'm having these incredible chest pains.
I did not get a response.
I said, no wonder.
She's getting her nails done.
Phone's in her purse.
So I called, and she thankfully answered the phone.
And I said, look, I think I'm having a heart attack.
I've got chest pains like I've never had before.
And she hung up, and I started just still walking around the room trying to assume a position to get rid of the pain, thinking it might be a muscle pull or a cramp or whatever.
Then the door burst open and it was what I thought was a medical team, Catherine and her mother and dad.
It was the hotel security guy who was expert in this and made me lie down.
They gave me an aspirin and the pain was just intense.
I can't describe the, it was as painful as this shoulder has been, but an entirely different kind of pain because you know or you think that it's the heart and then that adds even more stress to what's going on.
I never came close to losing consciousness or any of that and my life did not flash before me.
I didn't think I was going to die, but I did think this was the big one.
I didn't have what people who think they're going to die pretty that everything in your life flashes before.
I didn't have any of that.
So they laid me down and gave me an aspirin.
And as soon as under my tongue, the aspirin started to dissolve and the pain started to go away.
So I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
They'd called the EMT guys and they were on their way.
And they put an oxygen mask on my face and just said, they said, keep breathing through it.
Just keep breathing.
Slow, breathe slowly.
So I did all that.
And then all of a sudden, still laying down, pain came roaring back worse than ever.
And I was, they had to sort of pin me down to keep me from writhing around on the floor.
And everybody was as calm as they could be, at least in my vision, what I could see.
And then the EMT guys finally arrived and they hooked me up, EKG, started doing a bunch of tests.
They sprayed some nitroglycerin.
They told me to stick my tongue out and they sprayed some nitroglycerin under my tongue and then took me down the ambulance.
The ambulance roaring off, sirens blaring.
And it was on the way to the ambulance, the hospital that the nitro or whatever worked, worked because by the time we got to the hospital, the pain was totally gone and I felt 100% normal.
And it was then that extensive testing began.
The chest x-ray, blood.
They wanted to see if my enzymes in the heart were elevated, which would indicate a heart attack.
Had to do that for 18 hours.
Doctors came in and out.
Nurses came in.
I was stunned.
I'm in Hawaii.
I was stunned.
The nurses, the doctors were all huge fans.
But don't, I'm not, I'm saying that because I want to be nice to these people, but that had nothing to do with the treatment I got.
I'll get into that in just a second.
It's interesting.
I have people, I'm getting all kinds of advice.
Rush, you need to tell them what it costs.
You need to tell everybody what you paid for this.
And others say, no, no, no, you don't want to do that.
That's not relevant and so forth.
But it may be in the end, the point that I want to end up making about this, especially since the drive-bys are ripping me and thinking that I made a political comment about this simply by saying that the American healthcare system is the best healthcare system in the world.
So the doctor came in, Dr. Wallach, and he said, there's a reasonable probability that nothing happened here.
And there's a reasonable probability that something did.
And he said, what we're going to end up doing is giving you an angiogram, which is a cardiac catheter approach.
Those of you, I mean, you know what it is.
They insert a camera in your artery and feed it up to the heart.
And they take a picture, shoot dye, and examine the arteries to see if there's any blockage and so forth.
And they did that on days they're running together now.
And I guess they did Wednesday afternoon.
No.
Thursday afternoon.
They did it on Thursday afternoon.
Yeah, on New Year's Eve.
And it came back totally clear.
Zilch.
Zero Nada blockage.
There was no heart disease, nothing.
Zilch.
And they were stunned.
The doctors were all stunned.
My cholesterol, both cholesterols, normal, which has always been the case.
And I've had to get insurance physicals all my life.
Regardless of my weight, my cholesterol has always been normal, which is one of the reasons I believe that health circumstances of individual to individual are in part genetic.
But they looked, they couldn't believe that my cholesterol was, it's not supposed to be.
The textbooks say my cholesterol is supposed to be off the charts.
It was normal.
Blood pressure.
Well, the blood pressure was a little elevated because of the pain of the shoulder.
Pain causes blood pressure to go up.
Blood pressure was normal, on the high side of normal when they brought me in.
And let's see what else.
Blood sugar was normal.
Total picture of health.
And they're scratching their heads and they're happy about it.
But at the same time, they're a little puzzled.
And they said, Wednesday afternoon, we're going to discharge you.
And I said, no, no, no, I'm not leaving here.
I was ready to go, but Catherine said, you stay here tonight.
There's no reason we can miss New Year's Eve.
We'll watch the ball on TV from the hospital.
It won't be due.
Okay, so we stayed just and they clearly said, fine, if you want to stay the night, but we've got to keep you hooked up to all the monitors.
That's fine.
That's good.
I want you to do that.
So then checked out the next day and had the press conference at about 11.15.
And from there, innocent little press conference, no questions.
And all of a sudden, I have made a personal attack against Obama and the American healthcare system.
And it has been funny here to watch and listen to the state-controlled media go through its contortions to try to first say I took a swipe and now say I got tricked into supporting Obamacare because I praised the health care system in Hawaii.
And I just want to tell you what happened to me, the healthcare system in Hawaii has no resemblance, zilch, zero, nada, to Obamacare.
There wasn't one bureaucrat between me and the doctors.
There wasn't one insurance company.
It was me dealing directly with the doctors, me and my checkbook.
So I was willing to pay for it.
We've gotten to a point in this country where a lot of people, particularly Obama voters, think somebody else should pay for it.
It's some sort of right.
There's something almost religious or magical that health care is something that ought not cost anybody anything.
Everything else in life costs, but health care ought not to.
And because of that, there's no relationship between the customer's ability to afford things, patient, and the people that provide the service.
You've got middlemen, you've got bureaucrats in the state governments, the federal governments, and you got insurance companies.
I'll just tell you, whether I tell you what this cost or not, I will tell you this.
It was 35% less than it would have been had I had insurance.
35% less.
Nope, I did not confuse them by paying for it.
This bunch was totally prepared for that.
I'm being asked that question because I have confounded doctors in the past by saying, okay, I just want to pay for this.
And they're not set up for that.
They did ask me, okay, what's your insurance company?
This in the emergency room, by the way.
We're going through all the registration and they want the insurance.
I'm paying cash.
Oh, oh, okay.
Fine.
So that got it ridden.
All the bureaucracy.
There was no bureaucracy here.
There was zilch zero nada.
Now, I'm prepared for people to say, yeah, and the drive-bys are saying, yeah, but when you make the kind of money Limbaugh makes, of course you can pay for it.
Why is that my fault?
One of my objectives in life was to earn enough money to be able to totally provide for myself without having to depend on anybody else.
And I've done that.
It was an objective.
It was a goal.
And for some reason, this, I was able to do it largely because I'm an American.
I live in the United States of America.
I was able to do it.
There's opportunity.
There's freedom.
All kinds of freedom and opportunity here that doesn't exist in most places around the world.
And yet, because I've done this, somehow I am an exception.
I do not know what real Americans go through, but I do.
I've been broke a couple times.
I've been in circumstances where I could not have paid for this before, but I decided I didn't want to be in that circumstance.
And my only point in telling you this is that there was absolutely nothing in common with what's coming our way in healthcare.
You know what I wanted to say at the press conference?
I wanted to say, and I decided to pull back on this because most people were interested in my health.
I wanted to say, I'm just glad this happened before 2013 and Obama's health care went into effect because I might not have survived it.
There might have been somebody who said, you know what, we're not going to pay for Limbaugh to get treated here.
And remember, Obamacare requires you to have insurance or you get fined.
And I don't have insurance and I will get fined and go to jail before I buy it.
I got to take a break.
I'm along here.
We'll be right back.
And we are back, El Rushbo, and once again, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
So even as we speak today, the medical community at Queens Hospital in Honolulu have no clue what happened and no guarantee it won't happen again.
It could have been related to the spinal epidural I had the day before and then went out and played golf.
I've had spinal epidurals before, but I never went out play golf after them, but I've never had this kind of chest pain either.
They said it could have been an arterial spasm that we didn't catch.
Who knows?
So the point is that I was extremely lucky.
And I also found out that at least as of the tests that were taken last week, my health is in actually pretty good shape in many ways.
It's in excellent shape according to the markers that we in society use to measure health.
You should have said that the hospital people kept coming to us.
We don't know what to do with all these flowers.
People were sending in, all of you were sending in bouquets of flowers and cards for that two days we were in the hospital.
So we gave them to other inmates of the hospital.
But I tell you that the nurses, the doctors, Dr. Joanna Magno did the angiogram.
Dr. Wallach was a lead cardiologist.
Everybody was just superb.
They were entirely professional, competent, calming, and inspiring in the way they went about their work.
And everybody at the hotel, when I made that distress call, snapped to, it was the things aligned perfectly.
I mean, imagine if Catherine hadn't been in a hotel, she'd gone to some spa somewhere to get her nails done.
Imagine, who knows?
But everything just aligned perfectly that needed to be in order for me to get treated as quickly as humanly possible.
Thanks to all of you again for all of the emails and the flowers and cards.
It's great to be back.
Can't tell you how much.
And when we do get back, I'm going to play some of the media soundbites related to this, have a little fun with that.
Then we'll move on.
America's Truth Detector and the Doctor of Democracy.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, checking the email during the break.
Are you going to talk about the fruit of kaboom bomber?
That's what I'm going to call a guy.
Yeah, we're going to talk about the fruit of kaboom bomber and Obama on terrorism and all of this stuff.
But I wanted to, everybody is curious about my medical circumstances last week, and I wanted to thank everybody involved in treating me and all of you for the tremendous response I got from all of you.
The whole thing was actually an upper as it turned out.
And yes, a tech email.
Rush, do you know that there were Democrats saying that you had died?
Do you know that there were Democrats hoping?
Yeah, of course, folks.
I knew that was going to be the case.
You know, we're always being lectured to on civility.
But here's the thing you need to know.
Those people that were delighting in my potential death and distress, even hoping that I would die, they're the same people who are asking to control the health care system.
And I want to stress one more time.
When I went out there and said that the American health care system is the best health care system in the world, I was thanking and praising the people at Queen's Hospital.
And they said, that's a political attack.
That's a political attack on Obama.
As though the drive-bys had never politicized anything.
And then they tried to say, yeah, but Limbaugh inadvertently screwed himself here because Hawaii is the most progressive health care system in the country.
And in fact, it's been exempted from a lot of Obamacare because it's got so much of Obamacare in it.
So Limbaugh praised Obamacare.
I even had some journalists sending me notes on Sunday wanting me to comment on that.
And I said, how stupid and dense are these people?
There was not one shred of Obamacare in any aspect of the care that I got.
A, I don't have insurance.
Hell, I may have it.
I don't even know.
But I don't use it.
I pay cash for it.
I gave them a credit card and they took the credit card.
There was not one bureaucrat involved.
Now, in Obamacare, you have to have health insurance or go to jail or pay a fine.
I'm not going to get health insurance.
I'm not going to inflate my bill by 35%.
This cost me 30% less than had insurance been involved here.
There was not one bureaucrat determining whether or not I was going to get treatment.
There wasn't a death panel here to say there wasn't a set of guidelines saying, okay, this guy's 58, going to be 59 in two weeks.
This is going to cost X. Man, maybe it's not worth it.
That did not happen.
There was not one shred of Obamacare involved in my visit to the Queens Medical Center in Honolulu.
Here's some audio soundbites.
This is a montage.
Last Friday, Saturday, and Monday, a bunch of people from the media outraged that I praised the health care system.
Rush Limbaugh getting right back into the thick of the healthcare debate.
Lindbaugh said he's received, quote, the best treatment in the world and that there's not one thing wrong with the U.S. health care system.
He did weigh in on the condition of our health care here in the United States.
Lindbaugh could not resist the opportunity to turn the conversation about his health into politics.
A very vocal opponent of government health care reform.
Put in a plug for the current state of U.S. medical care.
Using all this attention to blast health care reform.
Limbaugh says the results showed no heart problems.
Then he delivered a similar diagnosis for America's health care system.
Limbaugh couldn't resist taking a political jab at a hospital news conference.
Couldn't resist taking a jab at the debate over health care reform.
Lindbaugh couldn't resist taking a political jab at a hospital news conference.
Rush Limbaugh didn't waste the opportunity yesterday to say that his experience at the hospital here was proof that the health care system is just fine.
Rush Limbaugh explains he now has first-hand knowledge that the current health care system works.
Of course it does.
If, like him, you make $33 million a year.
Rush Limbaugh managed to turn his trip to the hospital last week into an attack on President Obama and the Democrats.
Look, I'm sincerely happy Rush is okay, but does the man have to turn even an emergency hospital visit into a political event?
Still tweaking them.
And they're really upset because they know that I made a point.
They know that I'm, these people politicize everything.
All they do is see the politics of any event.
They see a terror attack or a potential terror attack and they, oh my gosh, will this hurt Obama politically?
How can we insulate?
Oh, another crasher got into the state dinner for that Indian prime minister.
A third one.
Oh, just this going to hurt Obama?
Well, this hurt Obama.
They're always looking at things in a political sense.
And why shouldn't I make that comment?
Hell, I could have gone even further.
I could have said, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank God that this happened to me now instead of 2013 when Obamacare goes in full force if it does.
So this fascinating to watch these people react.
I knew, I told Catherine, I said, that little comment that's going to, we're going to get three days out of this.
We're going to jab them.
You watch.
That's what they're going to hear.
State-run media outrage.
This is ABC's this week on Sunday morning.
Continue to be outraged.
And I used the hospital news conference to praise the health care system.
What Rush was saying, Limbaugh was saying, was great, except for the 47 million people who don't have health insurance and don't have access.
I do think in the end they do have to make a deal and reach a bill.
The Democrats have, you know, this has been a very difficult hill to take.
The political costs of it are obvious.
The approval rating of the president, the kind of ideological polarization around the size of government, there have been a lot of costs to get to this point.
It is further, we should point out, than any president has ever gotten.
No universal coverage bill has ever passed either chamber.
To be at this point and not get to the finish line would be almost unimaginable.
Universal coverage.
We don't have that yet.
That's going to take a while.
But did you notice here that Mr. Brownstein said 47 million people who don't have health insurance?
Ladies and gentlemen, I was taken to the emergency room where I was treated.
And anybody who had, it could have been some troll underneath a bridge, if they'd found with this kind of problem, put in an ambulance.
The law requires that the person get treated in the emergency room.
You don't need insurance for it.
They eventually come to you for some kind of payment.
But 47 million is actually 30 when you take the illegal aliens out of it.
We know this from President Obama.
And the number, we've run the numbers on, the number of people that really want health insurance and can't get it is 12 million.
But regardless, the Obamacare health care bill in the House or Senate does not insure these $47 million, Mr. Brownstein.
It doesn't come close.
And we don't need to spend $2.5 trillion to insure these 47.
We can take unspent stimulus money and insure all the people in this without changing the health care system at all.
And I want to reiterate this one point.
Now, a lot of people say, Russia, you're really running the risk here sounding out of touch when you talk about how you can pay for this.
I'm sorry, folks.
If that's being out of touch, I'll run the risk.
I rather look at it this way.
And this has happened to me before.
I remember in the mid-90s, I got a call, famous call.
HR, you'll remember this, from some guy in Nacogdoches, Texas, who said, you're out of touch.
Because I told him I'd paid the bills the other month and I didn't have any problem writing the checks.
And he said, yeah, you don't know what it's like to have to not be able to pay your electric bill.
I said, yes, I do.
I've gone through countless months where I've been unable to.
I said, sir, what I'd rather look at here is that I live in a country where I was able to set a goal and I've been able to achieve it.
And I might also add that it took a little government shrinkage for my goal to be realized.
That was the fairness doctrine.
Somebody had to get rid of a little bit of government in order for me to exercise fully the opportunities that I wanted to.
But this trip to the hospital, I'll admit that it's special.
I'm very grateful for it, but it's something that I've worked for.
I mean, I'm not running around asking anybody else to pay for it.
And I don't have an attitude in my head that somebody else ought to have to pay for it.
I budget this, figure these kind of things are going to happen as you get older.
So I set money aside for it.
And I don't know that that makes me out of touch.
I think it rather makes me responsible.
Now, I know that not everybody can do it under the current structure of our system, which is my real point.
Real reform of the health care system would involve nothing like what we have done in the House and Senate.
Real reform of the health care system would involve cost control, increasing access to health care.
And you could, it's not, it would not be hard.
It would take some time and it would take some commitment.
But if we could reestablish, like we have in every other commerce, commercial transaction in the country, where the customer, i.e. patient, pays based on the ability to afford.
And yeah, there will be different kinds of health care, just as there are different grades of cars and hotels and so forth.
Not everybody gets the best of everything in anything.
And yet we've evolved this attitude that everybody ought to get the best in health care.
And I know it sounds insensitive when I say that there are going to be levels.
Go to Canada or go to Great Britain and find out if in these wonderful socialist utopias, if everybody gets the best of everything.
It doesn't happen.
It's a pipe dream.
And it's irresponsible for Obama, the Democrats, to start promising that kind of thing, especially promising people they're not going to have to pay for it when there are premiums.
Everybody's costs are going to skyrocket like you can't believe.
Everybody's been sold a bill of goods on this thing.
They're not even going to have a conference committee now.
They're going to play ping-pong back and forth.
Democrat leaders.
And they're not going to tell a body.
Obama promised eight times to put this on TV.
Pelosi's mad that he made that promise.
She's mad that he's raising taxes on the middle class with health care, Cadillac healthcare plans.
She took a swipe at him.
We got the audio.
Eight times he promised all this transparency.
They can't afford you to see what's actually in this bill or to see them doing this.
And the Democrats, they are resigning in droves here.
We're at the five now, including Chris Dodd.
You know, Abraham Lincoln used to say about his wife, Mary Todd, she came from a very pretentious family.
He always joked, you know, God only needed one D in his name.
Mary's family needs two.
Well, Chris Dodd got three Ds in his name.
God only needs one.
We'll be back.
Rush Limbaugh, one of the 47 million uninsured Americans.
I am one of them, folks.
And we are here at 800-282-2882.
One more soundbite.
This is from the Morning Joe team on Monday morning.
Joe Scarborough, Mika Zezynski, Willie Geist, Andy Surrey from Fortune magazine, Hurricane Katrina Vandenhoeff from the Nation magazine.
Mr. Rush Limbaugh checked himself into a hospital.
He was on vacation in Hawaii, suffering from chest pains.
Well, he came out and had a New Year's Day news conference outside the hospital to announce that all was well with not just him personally, but with the American health care system.
No need for change.
Seeking your there's nothing wrong with the health care system.
Is it a resort of Hawaii?
What's his health insurance?
What's his job?
No!
Our thoughts and prayers were with Rush.
We're glad he helped.
Is he on Medicare?
For anybody in that position.
We're praying for him.
But yeah, if you make $50 million.
There you go.
It works.
You're going to probably support coverage.
And all of us around this table.
You're average.
In the first place, you don't need to make $33 million a year or $50 million a year to afford what happened.
My expenses, I'll put it to you this way.
My expenses were less than the cheapest car that you will go out and buy today other than one of these little bubble car smart cars.
It was five figures less than the average car.
Yet, for some reason, these people, that's the ta-da-ta-ta-timoral for people to pay for that.
I don't have insurance.
These people, I'm sure he has insurance once he's deducted.
No, I pay cash for it.
And it was less than the price of a car.
And just as is the case with a car, you could finance your health care coverage.
You don't have to come up with a whole lump sum.
Hospitals, doctors work with you on this.
But we've got to this point.
I know I'm going to lose this point.
I know I'm not going to succeed in convincing anybody here because we've had really 15 to 20 intense years of the Democrat Party slowly but surely pounding everybody with the concept that the one thing in human life that is psychrosync is not life itself, but rather healthcare.
And that it ought not cost anybody anything.
You know, when I was a young kid, I was a big fan of the space program.
I love the Mercury rockets, the capsule and the first suborbital flights.
And so I was mesmerized by it.
And I'm nine or 10 years old.
And I remember asking my dad, I'm watching the coverage.
I think it was Walder Cronkite on CBS watching the coverage of the first orbital flight, John Glenn, and somebody talked about how much it cost.
And I looked at my dad and I said, why does it cost anything?
Why don't people donate?
Don't they understand this is for their country?
And so the instinct of people, the instinct of people is that there ought to be things that don't cost anything.
As a young kid, without a full immersion into anything intellectual, politically, or economic, my instinct was to say, why does it cost anything?
Why don't the people who make the rocket donate it?
And why don't the people who make the capsule donate it?
And why don't the people working in the building that we see monitoring, why don't they donate their work?
And my dad looked at me and I could tell he was sort of challenged by the question because normally when I've asked a stupid question, he would tell me it was stupid and answer it anyway.
This one he kind of pondered because he knew he was going to have a tough time explaining this because this was an economics lesson that I was asking at age nine or ten.
And so my point is that there are people today who look at the healthcare adults who look at the healthcare system the way I thought of the space program or anything else American and thus patriotic when I was nine.
Why does anybody have to pay for it?
And the only way you can fully understand why somebody has to pay for it is to get some kind of a basic understanding of Economics 101.
And even people who have that still get clouded by or confused by what they consider the humanitarian nature or mission combined with the never-ending drumbeat politically of class envy and the poor and the cost and so forth that healthcare somehow has a moral, everybody has a moral right to it to the best.
And yet they don't say that about cars.
They don't say it about airplane tickets.
They don't say it about food.
They don't say it about water.
People have to, why don't we have water insurance?
Have you seen what bottled water costs?
But healthcare, and this is because for 50 years, the Democrat Party has wanted to nationalize it and come up with a single-payer system putting themselves in total power control over as many citizens as possible.
Anyway, brief time out.
We'll get to your phone calls and, of course, other things brewing and bombing out there in the stacks of stuff.
Be right back.
My friends, my friends, I totally get it.
Let me explain it to you this way.
Imagine the costs of my treatment out in Hawaii.
I know what those treatment, the costs would look like to somebody that doesn't have a job underwater in their house, no investment portfolio.
I know exactly.
I know how frightened.
That's exactly what Obama wants.
That's the fear he wants.
He wants everybody thinking, oh my God, I can't afford it.
Oh, it would break my life.
Government, please pay for it.
That's what they're all counting on, rather than people assuming responsibility for their own health care.
We'll be back.
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