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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 Nomas.
NOMAS.
And there will be more.
And we'll talk about that as uh program unfolds today.
Great to have you with us.
Here's the telephone number.
800-282-288-2.
It has not changed.
The email address, L Rushbo at EIB net.com.
Really am glad to be back.
I want to tell you what happened out in out in Hawaii.
And it's amazing, too, that I had this little press conference out there after right before I was released from the hospital, and I made one statement.
There's nothing wrong with the American health care system, and the whole state control media had a cow.
That personal attack on Obama.
When I said the whole health care system worked, and then the drive by started and said, wait a minute now, wait just a minute.
Limborg got caught here because Hawaii has the most progressive health care system in the country, meaning it's very liberal and so forth.
And uh so Limboy has inadvertently endorsed Obamacare and so forth.
So let me explain uh what happened and what I what I meant by the comment.
Now, before I left for two weeks prior uh to 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 uh uh almost intolerable pain 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 uh for those two weeks, uh uh oral prednisone or methyl prednisolone, uh, 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.
Uh it it uh it just the the side effects to it are 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 uh is uh 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 the uh uh another oral dose, which you don't want to be on this stuff long.
I was on it for two months uh when I lost my hearing.
They they tried to uh they threw everything at at my hearing loss trying to save it, and gained 40 pounds in two months, and 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 gonna put any of it back on.
So it was I I I don't mean to complain here, folks, but it was agonizing.
This this whole this whole pinch nerve was literally agonizing.
I I was I was sitting here doing this radio program with my right arm over my head like this.
If you're watching on the dental cam, you can now see it.
Uh it was just ungodly.
So we go over to Hawaii, and we left on Christmas night, went to Minneapolis and then Cape Girardo, and on Christmas night we arrived in uh in Hawaii.
And the next day, Saturday, and it the shoulder was just uh excruciating.
So called a doctor back here and asked, can you find somebody?
The the next step was to get a uh a spinal lepidural shot in the actual nerve uh uh rather than go back to the oral uh prednisone, methyl prednisolone.
So uh I was gonna do that when we got back uh back from from Hawaii.
And on Saturday, I it was just uh you know, I'd run out of the methyl prednisolo, and it was just it was agony.
So I called a doctor here, and can you find somebody out here to give me the spinal lepidural?
I've I've got I can't I can't wait till we get back.
So we found somebody, great, a great doctor, who came to the hotel on Sunday to evaluate me, filled out all the forms.
Um, and sh couldn't do this until Tuesday, which uh, you know, week ago yesterday.
So went into the hospital, Queen's Hospital, same one I went to when uh 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, uh, we got back from Kona that night, did not spend the night.
On Wednesday, got up, uh, went to lunch with uh with Catherine and her parents down at the hotel at the Kahala.
Everybody there was was fantastic.
And I guess it was about one o'clock or one fifteen, uh, 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, was waiting for her to come back because we're gonna go do some other things, and I started getting real sleepy, started yawning like crazy, and I got started getting real thirsty.
And I supported a couple of uh glasses of water and sat down and started for the first time, read a local paper, and I started reading about the the uh Friday furlough problem with teachers that they're having in Hawaii.
And all of a sudden, well, it wasn't all of a sudden, there was a slow build to uh and I've often I've often wondered what a 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 uh this this pain started building uh my left armpit and and left shoulder and and uh the left side of the center of the um 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, uh or that but it wasn't that, at least the tombs didn't have any effect on it.
And after about 10 minutes of this, we 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 I I never used the phone.
I hate to telephone because of my hearing, it's impossible for me to talk to people on cell phone.
Uh so I usually text people.
So I texted Catherine and I said, uh, I I'm having these incredible chest pains.
I did not get a response.
No wonder she's getting her nails done, the phone's in her purse.
So I called.
Uh, and she thankfully answered the phone and I said, Look, I I've I'm thinking I'm having a heart attack.
I got I've got chest pains like I've never had before.
And she hung up, and I've 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 uh medical team, Catherine and her and her mother and dad.
It was the hotel security guy who was uh expert in this and made me lie down, they gave me an aspirin, and it the pain was just intense.
I've I can't describe the it was it's it's a 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 d I di I didn't think I was going to die, but I did think this was the big one.
Uh I I didn't have what people who think they're gonna die pretty have as that that that everything in your life flashes before.
I didn't have any of that.
So they laid me down and uh and gave me an aspirin, and as soon as under my tongue, the aspirin started to uh 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 they were on their way.
And they put an oxygen mask on my face, and just uh 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.
Uh and everybody the calm as they could be, at least in in in my uh my vision, what I could see and then the EMT guys finally arrived and they uh hooked me up, EKG, started doing a bunch of tests, they sprayed some nitroglycerin, they told me stick my tongue out,
and they sprayed some nitroglycerin under my tongue, and uh then took me down the ambulance, the ambulance roaring off, sirens blaring, and it was on the way to the ambulance that uh the hospital at the uh that the nitro or whatever uh worked worked because by the time we got to the hospital, the pain was totally gone and I felt uh hundred percent normal.
And it was then uh that uh extensive testing began.
The chest x-ray, blood.
They wanted to see if my uh 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 mean, Hawaii.
I was stunned.
The nurses, the doctors were all huge fans.
But don't I I uh I I'm not I'm saying that because I want to be nice to these people, but it that had nothing to do with the treatment I got.
I'll get into that in just a second.
And I've got it's interesting.
I have I have people uh I'm getting all kinds of advice.
Rush, you need to tell them what it cost.
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 uh that's not relevant and so forth.
Um but it it it may be uh in in the in the end, uh if the point that I want to end up making about this, especially since the drive-by's are ripping me and thinking that I made a political comment uh about this simply by saying uh that the American health care system is the best health care system in the world.
So the doctor came in, uh, Dr. Wallach, and he said there's a reasonable probability that uh nothing happened here.
And there's a reasonable probability that something did.
And he said what we're gonna end up doing is giving you an angiogram, which is uh uh cardiac catheter approach, when those of you, I mean sure you know what it is, they uh insert a uh a camera in your artery and feed it up to the heart and they take a picture, shoot die and examine the uh arteries to see if there's any blockage and so forth.
And they did that on uh days are running together now.
They guess it did a Wednesday afternoon, no.
Thursday afternoon on Thursday afternoon, yeah, that on on New Year's Eve.
And it came back totally clear.
Zilch, zero nada blockage, there was no uh heart disease, nothing.
Zilch.
Uh 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's always been normal, which is one of the reasons I believe that health uh circumstances of individual to individual are 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, but blood pressure was normal, um, on the high side of normal when they brought me in.
Uh and uh 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 they're they're a little puzzled.
And they said, Wednesday afternoon we're gonna discharge you.
And I said, No, no, no, I'm not leaving here.
Uh I I'm I'm uh I was ready to go, but uh Catherine said, You stay here tonight.
There's there's no reason uh you know we we can miss New Year's Eve, we'll watch the ball on TV from the hospital.
Whoopy do.
Okay, so we stayed just just uh and they clearly said um uh fine if you if you want to stay the night, we'll but we gotta keep you hooked up to all the monitors.
Fine, that's good, I want you to do that.
So then uh checked out the next day and had the press conference uh at uh about 1115, and from there the f I mean it's innocent little f uh press conference, no questions, and all of a sudden uh I have made I have a personal attack against Obama uh and the American health care system.
And this 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 health care 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.
Some re we 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 um 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 got bureaucrats in the state government, 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.
Thirty-five percent less.
Nope, I did not I did not confuse them by uh by by paying for it.
They were this 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 I want to pay for this, and they're not set up for that.
They all they did ask, 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.
Paying cash.
Oh, oh, okay.
Fine.
Uh so that got it rid of all the bureauc there was no bureaucracy here.
There was zilch zero nada.
Now, I'm prepared for people to say, yeah, and the drive buys 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?
Why I have one 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 and 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, uh 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 uh an exception.
I do not know what real Americans go through, but I do.
I've been broke a couple of times.
I've 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 in that circumstance.
And my my only point in telling you this is that I had there was absolutely nothing in common with what's coming our way in health care.
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 gonna 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 gotta take a break.
I'm along here.
We'll be right back.
So they 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 Queen's hospital in Honolulu have no clue what happened.
And uh no guarantee it won't happen again.
Uh 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 played golf after them, but I've never had this kind of chest pain either.
Uh, they said it could have been an arterial spasm uh uh that that we didn't catch that who knows.
So uh the point is that I was uh extremely lucky, and I also found out that uh uh at least as of the tests that were taken last week, my health is actually pretty good shape uh in in many ways.
It's uh in excellent shape according to the markers that we in society use to measure measure health.
I 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 uh two days we were in the hospital, so we we gave them to um, you know, other uh inmates of the hospital.
But I tell you that the the nurses, the uh the doctors, Dr. Joanna Magno did the uh angiogram.
Uh Dr. Wallach was a lead cardiologist.
Everybody was just uh superb.
They were entirely professional, competent, calming, and uh inspiring.
Um in uh the way they went about their work at everybody at the hotel uh when I made that distress call.
Uh snap 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.
Uh uh imagine uh uh I who knows, but everything just aligned perfectly that uh that needed to be in order for me to get treated uh as quickly as uh as humanly possible.
Uh thanks to all of you again for all of the uh emails and the the flowers and cards.
Uh it's great to be back.
Can't tell you how much.
And when we do get back, I'm gonna place some of the media sound bites related to this, have a little fun with it, then we'll move on.
America's truth detector and the doctor of democracy.
Uh yes, ladies and gentlemen shaking the email during the break.
Are you gonna talk about the uh the uh uh fruit of kaboom bomber?
That's what I'm gonna call a guy.
Um yeah, we're gonna talk about the fruit of kaboom bomber and Obama and terrorism, all of this stuff.
But I wanted to I and everybody is is is uh is curious about my medical circumstances last week, and I wanted to thank everybody involved in in um treating me and all of you for the uh uh tremendous uh response I got from from all of you.
I just it was it was uh the whole thing was actually an upper uh as as it turned out.
Uh and yes, uh checked 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.
Uh 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 that were um delighting in uh in my potential death and uh and distress, even hoping that I would die.
They the the same people who are asking to control the health care system.
And I 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-by is it never politicize anything.
But it and and then they then they tried to say, yeah, but but Limbo inadvertently screwed himself here because uh Hawaii is the most progressive health care system in the in the country.
And uh it's it's 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.
Uh I I'm not gonna get health insurance.
I'm I'm not gonna inflate my bill by 35 percent.
This cost me 30 percent less than had insurance been involved here.
There was not one bureaucrat determining whether or not I was gonna get treatment.
There wasn't a death panel here to set there there wasn't a set of guidelines saying, okay, this guy's 58, uh, gonna be 59 in two weeks.
This is gonna cost X. Man, maybe it's not worth that.
Did not happen.
There was not one shred of Obamacare involved in my tris uh visit to the Queen's Medical Center in uh in Honolulu.
Here's some audio sound bites.
This is a montage.
Last Friday, Saturday, and uh, 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 health care debate.
Limbaugh 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.
Lindball 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 to 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.
Lenlock couldn't resist taking a political jab at a hospital news conference.
Rush Limbach didn't waste the opportunity yesterday to say that his experience at the hospital care was proof that the health care system is just fine.
Rush Limbaugh explains he now has firsthand knowledge that the current health care system works.
Of course it does.
If like him, you make $33 million a year.
Rice 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 Russia's okay, but does the man have to turn even an emergency hospital visit into a political event?
Still tweaking them.
And and uh they're really upset because they know that I made a point.
They know that I may these people politicize everything.
All they do is see the politics at any event.
They see a terror attack or a potential terror attack, and they, oh my gosh, well, 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, is this gonna hurt Obama?
Well, this hurt Obama.
They're always looking at things in a uh in a political sense.
Uh 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 uh if it does.
So it this fascinating to watch these people react.
I knew I told Catherine, I said, that little comment that's gonna we're gonna get three days out of this.
We're gonna jab them that you you watch.
That's what they're that's what they're gonna hear.
State run media outraged.
This is this is ABC's this week on on Sunday morning, continue to be outraged that I use the hospital news conference to praise the health care system.
What Rush was saying, uh Limbaugh was saying was great, except for the 47 million people who don't have health insurance.
And they're not as well and don't have access.
Uh, I do think in the end they do have to make a deal and re and reach a bill.
The Democrats have, you know, this has been a very difficult hill to take.
The the political costs of it are obvious.
Uh the approval rating of the president, the kind of ideological polarization around the size of government, there have been a lot of cost 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.
Uh, to be at this point and not get to the finish line would be almost unimaginable.
Uh universal coverage.
We don't have that yet.
That's gonna take a while.
But did you notice here that Mr. Brownstein uh said uh 47 million people who don't have health insurance.
Ladies and gentlemen, I was taken to the emergency room uh where I was treated, and anybody who had could have been some troll underneath a bridge if they had found with this kind of problem put in an ambulance.
The law requires that the person get treated in the emergency room.
That's you don't need insurance for it.
They eventually come to you for some kind of uh some kind of payment.
But the 47 million is actually 30 uh when you take the illegal aliens out of it.
We know this from uh 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 ensure these 47 million, Mr. Brownstein.
It doesn't come close.
And we don't need to spend two and a half trillion dollars to insure these 47.
We could take unspent stimulus money and insure all the people in this without changing the health care system at all.
Um and again, I want to reiterate this one point.
Now, I'm uh and a lot of people say, Russia, you you're really running the risk here, sounding out of touch uh when you talk about how you can pay for this.
I'm sorry, folks, if it if that's if that's being out of touch, I'll I'll I'll run the risk.
I rather look at it this way.
And this has happened to me before.
I remember written in the in the mid-90s, I got a call, famous call.
H.R. you'll remember this, from some guy in Nacadoches, Texas, who said, You're out of touch, because I had I I told him I'd paid the bills the other month and I didn't have any problem writing the checks.
Yeah, you don't know what it's like to have to not be able to pay your electric bill.
So I do.
I've gone through countless months where I've been able 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 doctor.
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 it's um uh special.
I'm very grateful for it, but it's something that I've worked for.
I mean, I'm 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.
Uh I I budget this and figure that this is these kind of things are gonna happen as you get older.
So I set money aside for it.
Uh 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 i it it's not it's would not be hard.
It would take some time and it would take some commitment.
But if we could re-establish, like we have in every other commerce, uh 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 with when I say that there's there are gonna 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.
Uh, and it's irresponsible for Obama, the Democrats to start promising that kind of thing, especially promising people they're not gonna have to pay for it when they're premiums.
Everybody's costs are gonna skyrocket like you can't believe.
Everybody's been sold a bill of goods on this thing.
You know, they're not even gonna have a conference committee now.
They're gonna play ping pong back and forth.
Democrat leaders, and they're not gonna television.
Obama promised eight times to put this on TV.
Pelosi's mad that he made that promise.
She's mad that he's uh he's raising taxes on the middle class with health care Cadillac health care plans.
She took a swipe at him.
We got the audio.
Uh 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 uh the Democrats there they are they they are resigning in droves here.
We're at the five now, uh, including Chris Dodd.
You know, Abraham Lincoln used to say about his wife Mary Todd, she came from a very pretentious family, and he always joked, you know, God only needed one D in his name.
Mary's family needs two.
Well, Chris Dodd's got three Ds in his name.
God only needs one.
We'll be back later.
Rush Limbaugh, one of the forty-seven million uninsured Americans.
I am one of them, folks.
And we are here at 800-282-2882.
One more soundbite.
This is from the um Morning Joe team on Monday morning, Joe Scarborough, Mika Bzinsky, Willie Geist, Andy Serwer from uh from Fortune magazine, uh, uh Hurricane Katrina Vandenhoov from the Nation magazine.
Mr. Rush Limbaugh uh checked himself into a hospital.
He was on vacation in Hawaii, uh suffering from chest pains.
Well, he came out and had a New Year's Day news conference outside the hospital uh to announce that all was well with not just him personally, but with the American health care system.
No need for change.
There's nothing wrong with the health care system.
What's the health insurance?
No.
Our thoughts and prayers were with Garage.
We're glad he should be.
Is he on medical?
Uh in that condition.
But I we we're praying for him.
Uh But yeah, if you make $50 million, there you go.
They're gonna probably get support coverage.
And all of us around this table.
In the first place, you don't need to make $33 million a year or $50 million a year to afford what happened in 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.
What I I sp it was five figures less than the average car.
Yet, for some reason, these people that's the immoral for people to pay for that.
I don't have insurance.
These people I'm sure he has insurance once he's a duct.
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 can finance your health care coverage.
You don't have to come up with a whole lump sum.
You can uh hospitals, doctors work with you on this.
But we've got we've got to this point, and I know I'm gonna lose this point.
I know I'm not I'm not gonna 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 psychrosanct is not life itself, but rather health care.
And that it ought not cost anybody anything.
You know, when I when I was a young kid, I was a big fan of the space program.
I love my my the mercury rockets of the uh the capsule and the the the first suborbital flights and so I was mesmerized by it.
And I'm was nine or ten years old.
And I remember asking my dad, I'm watching the coverage, I think it was uh Wooler 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, uh without a full immersion into anything intellectual, politically, or economic.
Uh my instinct was to say, why 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 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.
Uh this one he kind of pondered because he knew he was gonna have a tough time explaining this, because this was an economics lesson that I was asking at age at age nine or ten.
And so I'm my point is that there are people today who look at the health care adults who look at the health care 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 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 uh class envy and uh 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.
Uh people have to, you know, why don't we have water insurance?
Have you seen what bottled water costs?
But health care, 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 uh as possible.
Anyway, brief time out.
Uh, 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.
I totally let me let me explain it to you this way.
Imagine the costs of my treatment out in Hawaii.
I know what those treatment that the costs would look like to somebody that doesn't have a job, uh, 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 I can't afford it.
Oh, it would break my life.
Government, please pay for 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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