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May 12, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:06
May 12, 2011, Thursday, Hour #3
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If you haven't heard it, Tiger Woods withdrew from the TPC today, the tournament players championship tournament at Sawgrass, shot a 42 on the front nine and withdrew.
Knee injuries and an Achilles problem.
Forced him to pull out.
Now I turned on the sports journalists to watch their analysis of this.
And I I quite frankly was stunned.
Let me tell you what they said.
Doesn't matter who.
You know, we've said for the longest time, all this working out, all that bulking up.
Just not good for golfers.
You go back and you look at Tiger 97, years 2000 to 2002, very sinewy, very thin, very flexible.
And then all of a sudden he got into this workout regime, started bulking up.
And got so top heavy, no way those joints could handle all that weight up on top.
And then one of them said, and it's skirting.
An obvious issue they never mentioned.
And one of them said, Yeah, look at all those baseball players.
And the guy then paused and then bravely continued, as though he hadn't said anything.
Yeah, you look at all those uh baseball players.
There's no empirical evidence here that bulking up has uh has improved in their performance.
And I'm saying, what?
Anybody ever heard of McGuire or Barry Bonds or what have you?
So they they talked, they talked all around this issue without ever really mentioning it.
Uh where it comes anyway, Tigers out.
Uh he did a post round press conference.
It just said the knee just it hasn't recovered.
He actually should have taken a break, should not have played.
And now they're spectrum.
His tiger finished.
One guy said, this guy's got an 85-year-old body and a 35-year-old life.
And it's just I don't know if he can ever come back.
I don't know if he can ever play again.
Not just the next open.
I don't know.
I don't ever come back.
It was an amazing bit of analysis to watch it over a uh a knee injury.
Finished forever.
Finished for good, maybe.
They were all speculating as to whether that was the case.
Anyway, we are happy to have you with us here as we uh head on down the track.
Our telephone number 800 28282, if you want to be on the uh program.
Story here from Time Magazine by Erica Ho.
Erica Ho, H. O. is how she spells it, Erica Ho.
The kids are coming home to roost.
Surprise, surprise, thanks to a high unemployment rate for new graduates.
Many of those with diplomas fresh off the press are making a return to mom and dad's place.
In fact, according to a poll conducted by consulting firm 20 Something Inc., 85% of graduates will soon remember what mom's cooking tastes like.
Times are undeniably tough.
Reports have placed the unemployment rate for the under-25 group as high as 54%.
Many of these unemployed graduates are choosing to go into higher education in an attempt to avoid the job market, while others are going anywhere and doing anything for work.
Meanwhile, moving back home helps with expenses and paying off student loans.
The outlook is not sunshine and roses.
Rick Raymond of the College Parents of America notes...
Did you know that there was a group called the College Parents of America?
Well, not only is there a group called the College Parents of America, but somebody had to actually form it.
Which means that somebody had to conceive it.
So one of our fellow citizens, or maybe two, sat around one day, so you know what there needs to be an association of college parents.
And Voila, we got one, the College Parents of America.
And uh one of the guys that works there, his name Rick Raymond.
He said graduates are not the first to be hired when the job market begins to improve.
We are seeing shocking numbers of people with undergraduate degrees who cannot get work.
I guess moving back home isn't limited to philosophy majors either.
Story goes on and on to talk about the number of kids moving home.
No jobs to be had.
54% unemployment in the under 25 age group.
I also, I'm not sure.
I don't think these people show up in the unemployed numbers.
And I don't know that they uh really ever they've never had a job to lose.
So we know they don't show up in that category.
Fascinating, but moving home.
I mean, this is not a new trend.
It's just getting worse.
85% of new college grads move back home when with mom and dad.
And what is this bit about they'll soon remember what mom's cooking tastes like.
When was the last generation when mothers cooked?
When was that?
I know my mom cooked.
Your your mom your mom cooked, uh Brian.
Your Yeah, but you don't cook.
Dawn does not cook.
Interesting question.
The last generation of mothers who cooked.
You know, I figured out if if a couple getting married, you know how to really insult the bride.
Get her a bunch of cooking stuff from wherever she is registered.
You know, go get a toaster and a microwave oven and that kind of stuff.
You know, gag gifts.
This kind of stuff.
Healthcare news.
Uh two stories.
First from the AP, and it is from yesterday by Ricardo Alonzo Zaldivar.
Obama plan for health care quality dealt a setback.
President Obama's main idea for getting quality health care at less cost was in jeopardy yesterday after key medical providers called his administration's initial blueprint so complex it's unworkable.
That's not news.
We've known that since before it was signed into law.
The whole thing's unworkable.
The story is that's by design.
It is designed to be unworkable so that the private sector element in health care goes out of business.
The design of Obamacare is to, in 10, 15 years, have everybody have to go to government for health care.
Just over a month ago, the regime released long-awaited draft regulations for quote accountable care organizations.
These are networks of doctors and hospitals that would collaborate to keep Medicare patients healthier and share in the savings with taxpayers.
Obama's health care overhaul law envisioned quickly setting up hundreds of such networks around the country to lead a bottom-up reform of America's bloated health care system.
But in an unusual rebuke.
An umbrella group representing premier organizations such as the Mayo Clinic wrote the regime Wednesday saying that more than 90% of its members would not participate because the rules as written are so onerous, it would be nearly impossible for them to succeed.
Well, duh, that's by design.
It's not just a simple tweak.
It's a significant change that needs to be made, said Donald Fisher, president of the American Medical Group Association, represents nearly 400 large medical groups around the country.
Providing care for roughly a third of all Americans.
Its members, including the Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, and the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania had been seen as the vanguard for accountable care.
The medical groups say that they are worried that they'll be left holding the bag for losses, that the government has designed things so that there is no easy way To tell which patients are part of the program and that there's no reliable way to adjust for patients who are sicker and require closer follow-up and more expensive treatments.
Well, Mike, how it really is true.
How complicated they've made this.
This is it is a maze.
MAZE, it's amazed that people have to uh go through here just for the simplest treatment.
Many in the healthcare industry were silent partners backing Obama's overhaul law, but disappointment over the accountable care rules has put a chill into the relationship.
This is the kind of stuff that just makes me want to pull my hair out.
Before this law signed into effect, we're sitting here and we're warning everybody this is exactly what's going to happen.
You are signing on to and supporting a recipe for your own demise.
Don't you see it?
Don't you see that that's what's planned?
The whole purpose of Obamacare is to make everything so complicated and so frustrated so that there really is no improvement in anything that you scrap it and replace it with what?
Single payer, government health care.
That's always been the objective.
And so now Obama's main idea for getting quality health care at less cost in jeopardy after key medical providers called his regime's blueprint so complex it's unworkable.
Some I I just I find it hard to believe that these smart people couldn't see this before it was implemented.
It's all there on paper.
For crying out loud, something that takes two thousand pages to explain and that nobody's read.
Wouldn't it be quite natural to assume there's big trouble lurking in the middle of that?
This is the kind of stuff I I no, no.
I wonder about people who are supposedly smart, get caught up in all this.
I don't know.
I've never intellectually understood why.
Anybody in the private sector medical business had anything to do with this health care plan other than fear.
You know, the regime reaches out to you and sort of like a mob protection racket, if you don't get involved, wait till you see what we do to you.
And that probably is the only explanation.
But now it's so bad they can't even carry on the illusion.
They can't even follow through on the pretense.
They just now it's they're unworkable.
Went back.
We have uh story from uh real clear markets, uh, their website from February 26th, 2010, a little over a year ago.
One of the solutions that I, a relative nobody, I mean, I'm not a healthcare expert.
All I know is how to get sick and how to get well.
Other than that, I don't know much.
But I've one thing I've always understood in explaining the problem with the healthcare system is that the costs have no relationship whatsoever to the customer or the patient's ability to pay.
And that anywhere else in our system, that would spell doom.
For example, if hotel rooms were priced with no regard for what people could pay, there would be no hotel business.
Automobiles, the same, whatever it is, food.
And yet over here, standing alone by itself is this industry we called health care or call health care, and over there, the prices have nothing to do whatsoever with the simple sustaining element of private sector free markets, and that's the profit motive.
The profit motive is doesn't exist.
The profit motive, by that I mean you price a service or a product, whatever, in such a way that you earn money in the end, you earn a profit while people who buy it benefit profoundly from it.
And if that doesn't happen, your service or your product don't survive.
But the market rules.
But nobody in their right mind would design a product and bring it to market without one shred of concern over whether or not prospective customers could afford it.
Yet in healthcare, whether or not somebody can afford it is irrelevant.
It doesn't matter.
And so the question is why.
And that's why this story, it's a big bugamu of mine.
I've always said the cure to this problem, the solution to spiraling out of control health care costs, lies in health savings accounts, vouchers, what have you.
You put the patient, the customer, back in charge with what he's getting.
You make the patient or the customer, the whatever, have to pay and let him shop, like happens for any other product, and the competition, even in health care, will see to it that prices are met with the ability of everybody involved to pay and everybody involved being able to earn a profit in a normal everyday thing.
Catastrophic's a whole different thing.
I mean, you do need a separate system to handle catastrophic circumstances, just as you would need a special circumstance to handle people who want to buy $500,000 cars.
That's such a unique and rare thing.
You wouldn't have a major primary system built around that circumstance.
But healthcare is.
Healthcare is built around the fact nobody can afford it.
So it has no prayer.
And that's why you see these stories.
The main idea for getting quality health at less cost in jeopardy because providers call the regime's blueprint so complex it's unworkable.
Well, if the key medical providers had to price their service in such a way that people could afford it, you'd have a whole different circumstance.
Imagine if we needed hotel insurance, for example, or pick any other product.
You need the government coming in or somebody essentially buying it for you.
That business would not last long.
Healthcare does for one reason, because it represents the best single opportunity for Marxists and socialists to control people's lives.
Any other issue out there.
This story from Real Clear Markets is actually an opinion piece written by a doctor, David Gretzer, senior fellow Manhattan Institute, the author of Why Obama's Government Takeover of Healthcare will be a disaster.
Any cut to the chase here.
The problem with American health care is not greed.
It is structural.
After all, food and clothing are all organized with the profit motive.
And the president is not giving speeches that your butcher's too greedy, or that Macy's is overly concerned with the bottom line, and that they're greedy.
Is that the ultimate problem in health care is 12.
The number 12.
The number 12 is this.
Well, let me take a break.
I gotta take a break here.
I'm gonna be in big trouble.
The number 12 is the problem.
I will splain when we come back.
The American healthcare system, this again, according to David Gratz or Dr. David Gratzer, the American health care system is an accidental system.
Private coverage, the type that most Americans have, has its origins in the wage controls of the second world war, as employers offered rich health insurance benefits in pre-tax dollars.
Public coverage, like Medicaid and Medicare, on the other hand, takes its inspiration from the Beveridge Report in Britain.
Drafted in the early 1940s, Lord William Beveridge believed in zero dollar health care that people ought to pay nothing at the point of use.
Today's American health care fuses these two systems, but with a common economic flaw.
People are overinsured, paying pennies directly on every dollar of health service they receive.
The end result for every dollar spent On health care in the United States, just 12 cents comes out of the individual's pockets.
Now imagine what food costs might be if your employer paid 88% of your grocery bill, or what a trip to Sachs Fifth Avenue might be like if your company covered the vast majority of the costs of the shopping spree.
They go through the roof, right?
And if you go out and you could get primo stuff at SACS or go to the grocery store, buy whatever you wanted, and you're only paying 12 cents at every dollar.
Well, who wants to stop you?
By the way, it's the same theory with lowering tax rates.
If you lower tax rates, you'll report more dollars of income and go to town.
But in this case, when you're only paying 12 cents of every dollar in your own health care, you don't care what it costs.
Except now it's gotten so expensive that even the 12 cents out of every dollar can break your bank.
Stop and think of it that way.
On average, we only spend 12 cents out of every dollar, and we still can't afford it.
This is unsustainable.
And Barack Hussein Obama, mm-mm, little Barry Satoro, he understands it.
Far from addressing the 12 cent problem, Obamacare would exacerbate it with its rich subsidies, expansion of government programs, insistence that all insurance covers specific services, and some with no copayment at all.
Obamacare would pour fuel on the fire of health inflation.
It's one reason that even the chief actuary of Medicare and Medicaid predicts that costs rise under Obama's plan, which by the...
This is a column from 12 months ago, 14 months ago.
Costs are rising.
People need waivers, they're bumming out.
It is an absolute disaster.
My friends, we knew it before it happened.
Now, a couple more things on this 12% business and why it's bad.
Some people might think, hey, that's a deal.
I'm only spending 12 cents of what my health care costs are.
you ought to be saying, I'm going to spend 12 cents and they're this high.
Here's where we are.
This is a Of many problems, this is one rather simple way of explaining it.
Medical costs are based on the assumption that insurance companies are only going to pay a percentage of the price.
So of that belief, doctors and hospitals jack up the price in an effort to get something close to their cost from the insurance company.
But people without insurance sometimes have to pay those same prices.
Now, for example, let's if the cost of a band-aid, and I'm just going to make up some numbers here to use if the cost of a band-aid is a dollar, but the insurance company is only going to pay 80 cents of that, then the hospital will jack up the cost of the band-aid to a buck and a half so that whatever insurance pays gets close to the real cost.
And that just starts a cycle.
They're based on the assumption insurance companies are only going to pay a percentage of the price.
So you jack the cost up so that whatever percentage they pay pretty much covers your cost and maybe a little profit.
Now, the the origin of health care benefits in Dr. Gratzker talked about it here, started in World War II, but our health care system today is in a botched circumstance because of an unintended consequence of what people thought was a great thing at the time.
Employers only offered health care benefits because in World War II, FDR froze wages.
And the only way employers could compete for good workers, and they needed them.
I mean, yeah, they needed all kinds of people to work, but for certain jobs, really qualified people were needed, and there's a wage freeze.
So there was competition for competent workforce people.
So what happened was Employers started offering health care benefits as an incentive since they couldn't jack up the wage.
This is why wage and price controls never work.
Even though there was a control on the wage, they found a way to increase the wage by calling it something else.
In this case, a health care benefit.
And it really started with General Motors and the UAW, the United Auto Workers.
They were building tanks at the time.
And it turned out to be an unintended consequence.
General Motors and the UAW are perfect example of what a big mistake it was.
And you know everybody th knows that or the well, most everybody knows that uh withholding began in World War II.
But so did the whole notion of pre-tax health care benefits because of wage controls.
If there hadn't been wage controls, who knows.
There might not have ever had the concept evolve of pre-tax health care benefits.
Can't say for sure because circumstances later on after World War II might have resulted in the same thing.
But it was an unintended consequence.
So the government comes along and tells a employer you can't pay more than this.
But there's a competition for good workers, so they had to come up with enticements.
And health care was it.
And voila, expansion out of control, and this is where we are.
To the point now that twelve cents of every dollar spent on health care is actually spent by the patient.
And I'm telling you, there is no way it's ever going to make sense.
There's no way costs are ever going to be brought down unless that ratio changes.
Just that simple.
And there's not one thing in Obamacare that changes the ratio.
Makes it worse.
All by design.
Okay, back to the phones.
This is Risa in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Nice to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello.
I could not wait to call you today after I talked to my daughter last night.
She's a senior in high school, and their class had a video conference with some students in Ghana, Africa.
And the students in Ghana had to get on a bus and go fifty miles away to a village that had an internet cafe.
And they were supposed to discuss current events.
So I asked her what they talked about, and she said, well, they all seem to like Obama.
And I asked her why.
And she said, Well, they all like the hope and change thing that he's trying to do.
Wait a minute.
These are the students in Ghana Ghana.
That had to drive 50 miles to an Internet Cafe.
Yes.
Said they liked Obama because of hope and change.
Right.
What the hell is he doing for them in Ghana?
Well, then I asked her what else, and she said they thought that he was taking too much credit for finding and killing Osama bin Laden because um George Bush was mostly responsible for that.
The students in Ghana thought that?
Yes.
It was floored.
I was like, my God.
So the students in Ghana, they like hope and change, but they don't like Rabambo.
They like President Obama, but they think that he's trying to take too much credit for finding and killing Osama bin Laden.
So I get that, but it sounds like a disconnect.
I mean, how can you like the hope and change business, but then not like the fact that he's taking all the credit for killing Obama Osama?
I I think it's just obvious to everybody except the press in the United States that George Bush put that mechanism in place for hunting down terrorists.
Well, it says if you I I uh look, if you want to believe that, far be it for me to stand on your way.
I do think it's important to point out that the Obamas went to Ghana back in July of 2009.
And you know, you're more than likely you uh uh if if the any of these kids are aware that Obama was there, maybe even saw him they're gonna have some kind of connection.
That's that's where the hope and change is.
They probably heard him make some sort of comment about it.
But that's still nevertheless is interesting.
That they think Bush had more to do with capturing Osama than Robambo.
Yes.
Well, what did your daughter think of all this?
Well, she found it interesting too that they would think that, seeing as how they were Obama fans, and the way the press has been portraying it, it was kind of refreshing.
Wow.
Well, I'm glad you told us about that.
I appreciate the call, Risa.
Thanks very much.
By the way, uh, keeping you updated in the Senate, of course, they're grilling big oil executives, asking them about their subsidies.
The real news about gasoline prices, however, is happening in the House.
House of Representatives just voted to lift Obama's moratorium, drilling moratorium by a vote of 243 to 179.
That'll do more for gasoline supplies and prices than whatever the Democrats are doing with their inquisition of big oil execs over in the Senate.
Joanna Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Hello.
Glad you waited.
Welcome to our program.
Thank you, Russ.
I just wanted to make a quick comment on the uh Karen Gows situation, and then just one other comment and then I'll leave you B. Yes, ma'am.
I was just disgusted.
I was always taught from my father was a Mustang in the Navy.
We believe me, we were put we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps for very little.
Um as far as children goes because he didn't you know, you were responsible for yourself, period, in the conversation.
And to hear people and young adults, woe with me all the time makes me insane.
And that's all I have to say about that.
But nobody's looking at when they monetize the debt and they printed all this money, has a lot to do with the gas prices and food prices and everything, because the less our dollar is worth, the more dollars will be.
Well, we do here.
We have pointed it out on this program.
In fact, when the riots were happening in Egypt, I was the first to say don't discount the connection between quantitative easing too, the devaluation of our dollar printing so many dollars and the rising food costs over there.
Right.
But what I'm saying is that people are it's they disconnected from me, and they're not they're not um they're not paying attention to that anymore because it all think most people hand in hand.
This is not a criticism.
I don't think most people understand monetary policy.
I would bet you that you walk down the street of any city in the country and and grab a handful of people and tell 'em uh that the dollar is losing value against the euro, and they're not gonna know what you're talking about.
They they won't you're yeah.
I mean, they might understand that, but they they won't understand the whole notion of a f you tell them the dollar's falling and you're no clue.
Right.
Well, five years ago I would have been in that category, but I've since educated myself, so you know, but I'm I'm watching this happen, and it's it's it's a little bit scary, but we got to get private industry going again, because that's the only way the wealth comes from this country.
This socialism crap.
You run out of people's other people's money.
And that's what's happening now.
We're running out of other people's money.
We are.
Except we're printing, which is resulting in the devaluation that you're talking about.
Well, you're exactly right, Joanne.
Thanks very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, the proof of the damage done by the dollar's devaluation can be shown to the price of hamburger.
Now, Snerdley, as a vegan, you don't buy a hamburger.
So you have no idea what it costs, correct?
Well, get this.
Hamburger costs today about three times what it was twelve months ago.
And hamburger is not going up because of ground beef speculators.
Now the oil price is going up.
That's a speculators.
We want to go up to spend.
But there aren't any ground beef speculators.
The price of ground beef has gone, these are average figures nationwide, a dollar twenty-nine a pound back in November, three dollars and fifty cents a pound today.
And it's not due to evil hamburger speculators.
It's due to the devaluation of the dollar.
Call it inflation.
Call it too many dollars out there.
Call it quantitative easing.
And that's here, and it's happening around the world too.
A lot of the unrest going on around the world, some of it's political, sure.
But a lot of it is due to the price of food, which is an essential for uh some people.
They d Snertley wants to know why do these reports not say inflation is a problem.
Now you read these reports every day.
You can answer your own question.
They exclude food and energy in the inflation calculators because they say those are necessities.
So you can't really it's it's It's a it's a gimmick to protect government.
They exclude food and energy from the calculation of inflation.
That's why it's all bogus.
Uh Chris in Casper, Wyoming.
Great to have you with us here on the EIB network.
Hello.
Thank you.
Ditto's from Casper Rush.
Thank you, sir.
It's a beautiful part of the country out there.
We love it.
Uh born and bred here.
I'm a proud veteran of this country.
And been self-employed for 23 years of my marriage.
Have eight children, three in college.
And I've worked my whole life, and I listened to this woman that wants Obama and the government to give them the handouts and a couple years ago in the house.
Well, wait, no, wait.
She didn't specifically ask for help.
Her question to the one was, what would you do?
What would I do?
That's what she asked Obama in her.
She described her circumstance and then said, What would you do?
For all we know, she could not be an she might be an opponent of Obama's.
You never know.
What would you do?
And he wanted to blame the Republicans.
We don't know what she thought of his answer.
But regardless, I mean your point's still valid in the sense that you're self-employed, you're self-reliant, and you're sick and tired of people like Obama uh uh patronizing the freeloaders.
Right.
Rush, I'm a home builder, and I've I built my business and I invested into a subdivision three years ago.
Actually about five.
But three years ago I got the loan to go ahead and get the infrastructure.
I took millions out, put my family in hockey, the market collapsed, and my lawyer told me to claim file bank bankruptcy.
And I know.
My dad always taught me if you have two jobs and you need another, get a third.
So we've worked our way through it.
We're closing next week.
We're getting our houses back.
You just have to do what it takes, and we've lost something in this country.
We have.
And I'm I'm just appalled.
I know you are.
A lot of people are.
What we've lost in some areas, you can just chalk it up to parroting.
You're the product of your parents.
Some people don't have the benefit of the kind of parents that you had, and that does matter.
Quickly, for those of you in the uh audience who are of Hispanic uh origin and very upset at Obama for not focusing on amnesty and immigration first.
If he would have uh focused on amnesty for twenty million illegals and the costs involved there, he would have never gotten health care passed.
So you just weren't as important as Obamacare.
It's just it's dollars and cents.
It's really no more complicated than that.
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