Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings to you, folks.
Wake to have you here.
It's Broadcast Excellence, Rush Limbaugh, the fastest week in media.
And a proof of that is it's already Thursday.
Lightning fast here we are.
It's great to be with you as always.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, the email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com.
I have been, well, Time magazine has called me a Pope.
They have a cover story on Marco Rubio.
By the way, Rubio is going to do the Republican response to the State of the Union show.
And he's going to do it in Espanol.
He's going to do it in English too, obviously.
But he's going to have a response to the State of the Union in Spanish.
Now, what is your gut reaction when you hear that?
Is it, all right, right on, right on, outreach?
Cool.
Or is it, oh, gee, why are we pandering?
Why do we really think we're going to get any votes by speaking out to them in Spanish?
Really, what we're going to do.
I mean, do the Hispanics really not know who Rubio is?
Well, the answer to that is the Hispanics that vote Obama vote Democrat think Rubio is something that he's not.
Think he's a sellout, whatever their equivalent Uncle Tom is.
So he's going to reach out and do the response in Spanish.
What is your gut reaction to that, Snerdley?
What?
You think it's pandering?
I think it's total pandering.
Interesting.
Time magazine, it doesn't matter what I say.
It doesn't matter what I say what I mean.
When they interpret me incorrectly and I correct it, I'm still wrong.
I don't know what I've said.
The way I am interpreted by others is what I really meant and what I said.
What I mean doesn't matter.
I'm wrong.
What I said, that's the way the mainstream media reacts.
They say that I told Rubio in the interview on this program that what he was doing was admirable as though he had been granted absolution by the Pope.
That I, El Rushbo, in telling Rubio that what he's doing is admirable, had thus been granted absolution by the Pope, meaning it's okay.
Clear sailing, smooth sailing ahead.
El Rushbo said it's okay for you to have this.
And I was simply talking about, you've heard me say this, I was simply complimenting Rubio on his willingness to properly characterize Barack Obama and Barack Obama's policies and where Obama wants to take the country.
It came at the end of the interview.
And in the interview, obviously, I spent a lot of time talking about immigration.
And he explained his position along with that of the Gang of Eight.
At the end of the interview, I said that what he's doing was valuable, remarkable, admirable, and all that.
And they just, the drive-bys said, well, Limbaugh's, Limbaugh's softened his views on amnesty.
Limbaugh now, Rubio somehow got through to Limbaugh.
Limbaugh now agrees with the whole notion of amnesty and told Rubio his position.
I'm being mischaracterized here in what I said, but I just wanted to get that out again for the Purposes of you not being confused.
If your encounter with Time magazine was your first encounter of my having said that to Senator Rubio, I also got an email.
I've had a couple like this, actually more than a couple.
This one is the most succinct.
Dear Rush, why aren't the Republicans screaming from the rooftops every day about Obama's middle-class tax increases?
Rush, my take-home pay has dropped $300 a month due to tax increases, inflation hitting everywhere, especially in my utilities, heating bills going through the roof, food.
Everybody I know is getting hit.
This guy lives in Boston.
Everybody I know is getting hit the same way.
Why aren't the Republicans talking about this?
Why aren't the Beltway Republicans?
I mean, every day they ought to be talking about this and building momentum for 2014.
How many people, how many of you are described in this email?
And you've had frustration, your take-home pay is way down because of the, there are some tax increases, the payroll tax cut, which vanished, and inflation utilities, price of day-to-day things going up.
I think this is happening all over the place, but the media isn't doing any stories on that.
And I think that explains why the Republicans aren't.
The Republicans are in a purely reactionary mode right now.
I mean, whatever the Democrats and the media decide is going to be the narrative of the day is what the Republicans get in on.
I don't, I sense there's still shell shock.
And the way the Republican, I'm just guessing, and I haven't talked to any of them, I'm just guessing.
It's only February.
You know, Obama was immaculated not even two weeks ago.
And they're figuring, I'm going to start hammering a guy right now.
It just got started.
We've got four more years of this.
I don't think they're so much in the game.
Plus, they're focused on the sequester.
And speaking of that, the drive-bys are getting panicked by the day on this.
I've got a story here from Reuters.
Even brief spending cuts could hit U.S. economy hard.
And it's a story that's filled with massive amounts of misleading information, incorrect information.
It's designed to frighten and instill fear as it mischaracterizes the sequester and what it means and how big it is.
But what's going on here is this ongoing attempt every day, multiple times a day, that anytime any serious spending cut point is made or discussion ratches up, ratchets up, they move into gear and they start sending shockwaves of fear through everybody over the concept of spending cuts.
It doesn't matter how big or how small.
And that's what this story is, and the headline basically says it.
Even brief spending cuts could hit U.S. economy hard.
You see, this all fits in with the idea that all prosperity comes from Washington.
That the American dream has its root through Washington.
If you don't go through Washington, if you don't deal with Washington, if you don't interact with Washington, you're not participating in the American dream.
You don't have a chance.
And if there is anything that happens that is going to in any way harm or shrink or make smaller the size of government, then oh no, that means a direct hit on the economy, a direct hit on the prosperity of the country, on the prosperity of the American people.
It's really insidious how this has taken hold.
But they're doing everything they can to poison the minds of the low information crowd about the sequester, about spending cuts.
You can't find anywhere in the media that the sequester was Obama's idea.
You can't.
The whole concept of the sequester was Obama's and the Democrats.
It was their idea.
It was their proposal.
And now they're acting like it was forced on them by these mean Republicans who only want to hurt people, who only want to take things away from people, only want to harm prosperity by punishing a beloved government and taking things away from it.
And that's where we find ourselves.
So the Republicans, they're not out talking about your costs of living going up, your taxes going up.
I think they're still in shell shock.
And I think they're still in a reactionary or responsive mode.
And they get up every day and they try to ascertain, okay, where are we going to get hit today?
And they prepare a defense for it or try.
So they get up, okay, are we going to get hit on immigration today?
Are we going to get hit on guns today?
Are we going to get hit on the sequester today?
Are we going to get hit on gay rights today?
Are we going to get hit on the war on women today?
Are we going to get, that's their mindset.
What are we going to get creamed with today?
The idea of getting up and going to a bank of microphones and taking it to Obama.
Oh, no, we can't do that.
But that would anger the moderates.
And the independents, we can't, they're not in the mindset yet, folks, of being critical of Obama has any kind of a positive upside.
As for Obama, he went to the national prayer breakfast today.
I was reading a blog, the White House dossier.
A guy used to be part of the White House press court, Kevin something is his name.
I don't have it right in front of me.
I think it's Kevin.
And he said, I didn't see Obama at the prayer breakfast today.
He said, Obama was barely awake.
You know, Obama doesn't show until 10 o'clock in the morning.
He's a night hawk.
He's a night owl.
Obama stays up late and he doesn't get up early.
And so this guy is describing Obama at the prayer breakfast as heavy eyelids, chewing Nicorette to deal with his nicotine addiction, openly chewing gum and wiping his eyes as though trying to remove the morning crustiness.
You have that happen to you.
The morning crustiness in your eye, you've got to wipe that out.
That's what he described Obama as doing.
He said Obama's remarks at the national prayer breakfast were perfunctory and listless, as though he really didn't want to be there, but had to do this kind of thing.
So we have some sound bites from this.
Let's go to them right now.
This is Obama in Washington, national prayer breakfast.
Now, it didn't start to something like 10 or 10.30, but apparently he had to get up, had to be somewhere at 7.30, I guess, for the actual breakfast itself.
And the White House dossier piece, Kevin, yeah, Kevin Coffer.
He makes the point that, Well, I inferred from his piece that Obama's not out of bed by then.
So he was not entirely cogent.
Just wasn't there.
Let's give a listen.
We have two sound bites of Obama.
It is always just a wonderful event.
But I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we've been talking about the whole time of the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten on the same day of the prayer breakfast.
I mean, you'd like to think that the shelf life wasn't so short.
But I go back to the Oval Office and I start watching the cable news networks, and it's like we didn't pray.
This is unreal.
And I love this.
So prayer doesn't work.
And this proves it.
Obama goes to the prayer breakfast and everybody else goes to the prayer breakfast.
It's a wonderful event.
And it's all about him, you see.
The national prayer breakfast.
Oh, don't believe that when he says he doesn't watch cable.
He watches it and he has people assigned to watch it.
Just like I do.
It's a wonderful event, national prayer breakfast.
It's always about me every year, and I enjoy coming for that reason.
But I do worry sometimes that as soon as we leave the prayer breakfast, everything we've been talking about the whole time of the prayer breakfast seems to be forgotten.
On the same day of the prayer breakfast, I mean, you'd like to think that the shelf life of the prayer wasn't short.
I go back to the Oval Office and I start watching cable news and it's like we didn't pray at all.
So God's not listening.
Well, I think everybody else is praying to Obama, but gods don't pray.
They sit there and listen to the prayers.
But anyway, can you imagine any other president ripping prayer even in a joke way?
Well, we all come up here and we pray and it doesn't even work.
It ain't even last the whole day.
I go back to the White House, turn on TV, and I'm being criticized.
National Prayer Breakfast all about Obama.
Here's the second Sunday.
That's what I thought of as I took the oath of office a few weeks ago and touched those Bibles.
The comfort that Scripture gave Lincoln and King.
Most of all, I thought about their humility.
Let us retain that humility, not just during this hour, but for every hour.
And let me suggest that those of us with the most power and influence need to be the most humble.
Right.
Like right before you decide to pick somebody off the kill list and launch a drone.
Right.
Now, this next is a guy named Benjamin Carson.
But the prayer breakfast was at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
I'm sorry.
The next speaker is the Johns Hopkins Hospital Pediatric Neurosurgery Director, Dr. Benjamin Carson.
And this guy rips Obama-ism.
He ripped into Obama-ism at the prayer breakfast with Obama sitting there.
Now, some people say, they say, well, that's not fair because it doesn't hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made $10.
Where does it say you have to hurt the guy?
He just put a billion dollars in the pot.
You know, we don't need to hurt him.
It's that kind of thinking.
It's that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands.
That money needs to be back here, building our infrastructure and creating jobs.
Whoa, right on, did you?
This guy is, he's talking to Obama.
Obama's sitting there, and he's saying, people saying it isn't fair because it doesn't hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made $10.
Where does it say you have to hurt the guy?
He just put a billion dollars in the pot.
So this neurosurgeon is speaking out in favor of the 1%, the 5%, the 10% who are actually paying the freight in this country via income taxes.
They're the ones actually paying the freight.
What are we going to hurt them for?
I mean, they're already putting money in the pot.
Why do we got to hurt them?
He's exactly right.
And then he says, you want to know why we got 607 banks in the Caymans with American money?
Because they're running away.
They don't want to be hurt?
Love this guy.
He wasn't finished either.
Here's my solution.
When a person is born, give them a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account, to which money can be contributed pre-tax from the time you're born to the time you die.
When you die, you can pass it on to your family members so that when you're 85 years old and you've got six diseases, you're not trying to spend up everything.
You're happy to pass it on, and there's nobody talking about death panels.
That's number one.
And also, for the people who are indigent, who don't have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we already have this huge pot of money.
Instead of sending it to some bureaucracy, let's put it in their HSAs.
Now they have some control over their own health care.
That is Benjamin Carson, who is the Johns Hopkins Hospital Pediatric Neurosurgery Director, and he is giving his recipe there for a health care system, the exact opposite of Obamacare.
This is at the National Prayer Breakfast today.
So you see, these people are out there, and they're willing to speak up.
They need to be encouraged.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Okay, my friends, I want to spend some time here.
Just a few couple of minutes here on Benjamin Carson.
You don't hear people speaking this way.
The Republicans don't speak this way to Obama.
They don't speak this way about Obama's policies.
Here you have the guy who's had a neurosurgery, Johns Hopkins Hospital, at the National Prayer Breakfast.
Some people say it's not fair because it doesn't hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy made $10.
Why did he have to hurt the guy?
He just put a billion dollars in the pot.
The guy's paying the freight.
What are you going to hurt him for?
What's he done?
And his solution to health care, when the person's born, you give them a birth certificate, an electronic medical card, and a health savings account.
Money's contributed pre-tax from the time you're born till the time you die.
We're already spending this money and more anyway.
He's simply talking about reallocating resources.
Put it in the hands of the people who are going to spend it.
Put them in charge of their own health care.
They build up while they're young, while their children, a nest egg gets built in their health savings account.
It's pre-tax.
It's put in this account for the time you're born till the time you die.
It's the equivalent of what would be spent on you in other forms.
And when you die, whatever you haven't used, you can pass on to your family members.
Do with it what you want.
You can pass it on.
You can make it part of your estate.
But you are in charge of your health care.
You are in charge of how much you spend on it and how much you get and where you go.
This reintroduces competition.
This reintroduces market forces.
This is what brings cost down.
So in 43 seconds, the director of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins gave the answer to Obamacare in 43 seconds.
And it's not 2,700 pages, and it doesn't enlarge the government.
It doesn't hire 16,000 IRS agents, and it covers everybody.
And there'd probably be money left over after all of this.
Yes, don't panic, my friends.
I am here.
It's great to have you back, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
I'm going to take advantage of the occasion of these comments by Benjamin Carson to explain what a health savings account is to people who may not know.
Because, you know, we have constant audience expansion, growth here.
And since the election, well, even prior to that, but there are people listening here for the first time ever, or they've been listening for a year or two.
And of course, they haven't heard everything that you have if you've been here for the whole 20, 25 years.
But this is really profound, what this man said at the national prayer breakfast.
Now, you all know, let's put on column A, Obamacare, and just briefly review.
We've got 2,700 pages.
The federal government is empowered to eventually make every health care decision for every American.
The older Americans get, the less likely the government will authorize spending money to treat them, particularly if they have terminal diseases, because the government will determine that it's not worth the money.
Somebody is near the life expectancy and they have a debilitating disease.
The government, and this is in Obamacare.
The term death panel isn't, but that's how it works out.
This is all in Obamacare, as the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall determine.
There is a board, there is a panel of people.
We don't know who it's going to be, but there's a panel of people that will make decisions on the allocation of health care money, which is all going to come from government eventually when this is fully implemented.
And if your parent, your grandparent, comes down with a very bad disease late in life, government may decide it makes no sense to spend that money in treating that disease because the expected number of years left in that person's life is very few.
They might think we can spend that money elsewhere on younger people or on other things where it might become more productive.
Now, in a free society, this shouldn't happen.
You need to be in charge.
Just like when you go rent a hotel room.
You buy a hotel room where you want, where you can afford, where you want to stay.
Same thing with food, same thing with a car, same with anything else you buy.
You buy it based on what you can afford, based on what you want.
And of course, the American dream is that you continue to work hard and try to improve your standard of living so that you can afford better and more things for you and your family as you go on through life.
That's what's fundamentally changed and is in the process of fundamentally changing in our country.
Imagine if you had to go to the government for a hotel room.
Imagine if you had to go to the government for your food or for your telephone service or anything else, be it a need or a desire.
But the fact that governments, state and federal, are involved so much of the healthcare system is reasons why, the reason why the price has skyrocketed, there isn't any competition per se, but you're not in charge.
The consumer needs to be in charge of what is spent by that consumer for that consumer.
That causes and creates competition for that consumer's dollar, and that's how prices are kept affordable.
That doesn't exist in healthcare today.
So, the Obamacare plan is 2,700 pages with a panel that will determine who gets treated and who doesn't.
There are 16,000 new IRS agents to determine whether or not you're complying with the law by either having an insurance policy or paying a fine or a penalty if you don't.
Virtually every aspect of your health care, the portion of your life dealing with health care, is going to be administered by and monitored by government, with you having nothing to do with it.
And that just scratches the surface.
Remember the woman who appeared, well, you may not remember, ABC three years ago did a primetime special with the president, the East Groom of the White House, where the president sought to explain his health care plan.
And there were American citizens in the audience.
A woman stood up, an American citizen, folks, and actually asked the president of the United States, not her doctor, not a family member, but the president of the United States, a woman stood up and said, Sir, what about my 100-year-old mother?
She has a huge will to live.
She's got a great spirit, but she needs a pacemaker.
Will you factor things like spirit and will to live in determining whether people like my mother would get a pacemaker?
Why is a citizen asking the president of the United States if her mother can have a medical procedure?
Sometimes I think I'm the only one who thought that obscene.
And the president stood up, he answered it, put a smile on his face, said, No, we can't take things into account like will to live and spirit.
We just can't do that.
There are just going to be times, the president said to this woman, where the best thing we can do is just give your mother a pill and let her try to enjoy her remaining days.
And the show ended, and people discussed it as though nothing offensive had happened.
This doesn't happen in a free country.
This doesn't happen in the United States of five years ago.
This doesn't happen.
The President of the United States doesn't conduct a healthcare seminar in the White House with citizens asking if he will permit their family members to live, if he will permit their family members to be treated medically.
This was before Obamacare was signed into law.
Now it's been signed into law, now it's in the process of implementing.
And now we've been told the IRS by the IRS the cheapest, the cheapest mandatory health care plan for a family of four.
Starting in 2016 or 2018, whenever this is fully implemented, will be between $16,000 and $20,000 a year.
The cheapest, mandatory.
If you don't have it, you have to pay a penalty.
Whether you have health insurance or not, it's going to cost you.
So that's briefly what we have at present.
This is what has been passed by Congress and signed into law.
And this is what's being implemented.
This and many other horror stories.
And then we have Mr. Benjamin Carson, who again spoke today at the National Prayer Breakfast.
He is the Johns Hopkins Hospital Pediatric Neurosurgery Director.
He's got an entirely different idea.
Play sound bite 9 again.
Let's hear it in his words.
This is his alternative to Obamacare.
Here's my solution.
When a person is born, give them a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account, to which money can be contributed pre-tax from the time you're born to the time you die.
When you die, you can pass it on to your family members so that when you're 85 years old and you've got six diseases, you're not trying to spend up everything.
You're happy to pass it on, and there's nobody talking about death panels.
That's number one.
And also, for the people who are indigent, who don't have any money, we can make contributions to their HSA each month because we already have this huge pot of money.
Instead of sending it to some bureaucracy, let's put it in their HSAs.
Now they have some control over their own health care.
Now, here's the point.
What is a health savings account?
Many of you in the audience already know, and I'm going to ask you to indulge me as I try to explain them to people in the audience who don't know.
Pretty much what Mr. Carson said: when you are born, a bank account, look at it that way.
When you're born, a bank account is started in your name.
You get a birth certificate and you get a medical card and a health savings account.
Money is contributed pre-tax from the time you're born until you die.
They say, where do we get the money?
We simply shift from all of the money that's being spent on health care now by governments, and we shift it to the people, to you.
We put it in a bank account for you.
Everybody gets one.
Healthcare spending is 53% of GDP, or it's heading in that direction.
We're spending $3.5 trillion every year in this country, $1.3 trillion of which we don't even have.
So we take 40, 50% of that, and we allocate it to the people.
It's theirs in the first place.
They earned it.
Your parents earned it if you don't have enough to start the health savings.
You obviously don't when you're an infant.
But it grows.
You then need to go to the doctor.
You then need medical treatment.
You've got a health savings.
You've got a savings account.
You have a bank account with money in it that otherwise would go to insurance companies or go to the government or wherever else.
But it's yours.
You spend it as you need it When medical events come up, and we're talking in this case, it's about standard ordinary operating procedure, doctor visits, and so we're not talking about catastrophic injuries.
Those are handled by insurance and would continue to be.
But every day, commonplace doctor visits, hospital treatments, so forth, handled by your health savings account.
And whatever you don't spend, you get to keep and use however you wish, thereby motivating you to do thing, two things, not spend it all on medicine, because people are spending a lot more on their health than they actually need to be.
And the second thing is, you'll help create competition among medical providers, among doctors, among hospitals, among MRI testing centers to get your business.
They'll have to have a price that's attractive to you, just like anybody else trying to sell you anything.
There might even be sales someday on healthcare if this system were ever implemented.
But the point is, you're in charge of it.
And until we reach the point where the consumer has a direct relationship with his health care in terms of cost and expense, we're never going to get costs down.
In 43 seconds, Mr. Carson here gave the opposite to Obamacare in a way that would work by putting every person in charge of his or her health care.
Now, some people might not want that responsibility, and that's what people like Obama and the Democrats bank on.
But a health savings account is just money that's already being spent on health care and health insurance being reallocated, transferred, if you will, back to you.
It was yours in the first place anyway.
You earned it.
That's the only way the government ever got it.
You or your parents earned it.
They don't have a dime without taking it from somebody first or borrowing it or printing it.
This plan just, you keep your money.
It's in an account where you use it for medical care.
What you don't use is yours to do with as you wish, include pass on to your kids when you die.
Quick timeout.
Back after this.
Don't go away.
There we go.
Turn on the mic and it works better.
Rushland boy, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Let's grab a phone call.
We got Jody from Madison, Wisconsin.
Jody, great to have you here.
Welcome to EIB Network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
Oh, what a pleasure to talk to you.
I've been listening to you since the 80s, and I never called you before, but I'm telling you, when you had that sound bite on with Dr. Carson, I almost dropped my jaw.
And I did run in and I called Dr. Carson and told him he's my hero.
It's amazing.
I've been saying the same thing for years, ever since his healthcare started coming out, and explaining to people how HSAs would have solved all the problems.
And not only that, just think of how wages would increase in employment because it's no longer on the backs of the employer.
It's just, I just can't tell you how astounded I was today to hear some talk about a human being.
Well, look, I realize this is highly, it's extremely encouraging.
It's uplifting to know that A, there's somebody out there who understands and knows this, but even more than that, that's willing to say it to Obama's face.
This man said it while Obama's sitting there.
Now, this is easy for me to say, but I'm going to tell you something.
This is the kind of stuff the Republican Party needs to be said.
This is the kind of thing the Republican Party should have been saying for the past four years.
Now, I know they tried various times and places to talk about health savings accounts, but their plan was still the government at the center of everything.
That's what I mean by the Democrats create an agenda item.
The Republicans say, oh, okay, is that what we're talking about today?
Okay, national health care.
Well, we don't entirely believe in that, so we'll come up with an alternative, but it's still an agenda set by the Democrats.
What's remarkable about Mr. Carson here, and he may be Dr. Carson, I don't know.
I guess he is Dr. Carson.
Here's my solution.
A person's born.
He gets a health savings account to which money can be contributed pre-text.
Think of it as a 401k for healthcare.
And you put as much money in it as you want.
And by the way, we'll supplant that because there's money being spent on your behalf, theoretically, in healthcare by the government, just reallocated.
But in 43 seconds, the man had a free market-based solution to the problem that was understandable and inspiring.
And it does make you say, it does make you ask, where's this been for the last four years?
Where has been the leadership articulating this kind of thing?
Okay, my friends, sit tight.
We got much more to scratch the surface here with as the EIB network rolls on.