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And I feel hard to describe this.
A 43-second soundbite from Dr. Benjamin Carson is giving me the shakes.
And it's hard to describe it because of what could have been.
What could have been versus what is going to happen and is in the process of happening?
It's devastating what's in the process of happening.
Healthcare is concerned.
Everything else too, but healthcare is the focus.
We just had a story the other day that Obamacare is going to result in 7 million Americans losing their employer-provided health insurance.
This is new from the CBO.
It was unexpected.
It was not part of the original Obamacare proposal.
Nothing like that.
It's twice as much.
Nothing like this was ever told to people.
And look, folks, it's one thing.
I remember saying the truth and telling people the truth about this in the midst of the healthcare debate, but I'm not an elected Republican.
I'm just a guy on the radio informing you.
You were saying all these things, too, to your friends.
Any number of people, the vast majority of American people in every poll taken oppose Obamacare.
And as usual, the thing was punted to the Supreme Court like campaign finance reform was under the guise that there's no way the court will ever find this thing constitutional.
And they did.
And now we are stuck with it.
And in 43 seconds, Dr. Carson at the National Prayer Breakfast Two devises or explains, proposes a system.
And he's not the first to do it.
It's been done by countless people.
Me, the Heritage Foundation, any number of scholars, medical professionals, have had alternative proposals to Obamacare.
Quite frankly, the Republicans never had the vote to stop this, and the way the Republicans went, Democrats went about passing it, of course, skirted the edges of the law, skirted the edges of the Constitution.
And that's why repeal actually became the last line of defense on this.
We're stuck with it now.
I mean, it is the law.
There's nothing to stop a future Congress from repealing it and reversing it.
But the more this Obamacare gets its tentacles entangled in the deep webs of our society, the harder it will be to untangle it.
That's why early repeal was such a crucial thing.
This thing takes four years to fully implement.
But we've never walked back an entitlement.
We've never canceled one.
We've never taken one back.
In this case, we have an ideal replacement for Obamacare that is much better, that promotes the healthcare industry, that promotes cost-saving, it promotes competition, and it gets everybody covered.
And Dr. Carson said the one thing that Obama and the Democrats do not want to hear.
Instead of sending all of our money to some bureaucracy, let's put it in our health savings accounts.
Now people would have some control over their own health care.
Exactly right.
That's what's going to end up vanishing, folks, is you're not going to have control over it.
Your own health care.
And that's exactly the way Obama and the Democrats want it.
They want to be in control of your health care.
And as it stands, they are.
But I don't know, hearing this 43-second soundbite was like a slap to the face to realize what could have been and what's probably been lost.
There was a journalist covering the national prayer breakfast, a pool reporter.
You want to hear what the pool reporter said in part?
Quote, John Kerry began yawning seven minutes into Dr. Carson's speech and basically didn't stop.
So that's what people who weren't there and didn't watch it, that's what they know about it.
That the new secretary of state spent seven minutes yawning through Dr. Carson's speech.
It's just, I don't know.
It's a real shocking shame here.
What we're going to be doing, what we're going to be spending, and what's going to happen to the health care system and how people are going to have less of it.
It's going to cost through the roof.
And the solution, the alternative is so simple that it was difficult to explain to people.
No, it's too simple.
Everybody thinks healthcare, because it has become that, this is massively complex.
And it is.
So the solution that sounds simple is not, that's too simple.
That never worked.
And admittedly, some people don't want to be in control of their health care.
They'd rather farm it out.
They'd rather somebody else handle it.
They don't want their responsibility.
And here comes one of the natural objections.
Well, Rush, what do you do?
Okay, so Enos Slobodnik has his health savings account.
What if Enos goes out and blows it all in Vegas?
And then Enos needs an operation.
What do we do?
We're still going to have to pay for him, right?
Theoretically, yeah.
But one of the things you could do is put a restriction that money in the HSA can only be spent on your health.
Now, you can't go blow it in Vegas.
Doesn't stop people still trying to do it.
But that's not the point.
For those exceptions like that, come up with a plan to deal with them.
But we're talking about the overall philosophy here.
We've got an out-of-control healthcare system.
It's just been made more out of control and worse.
I don't know.
There's nothing to be done here.
I wanted to play his soundbite.
I wanted to go through the explanation of what a health savings account is.
And I wanted to take the occasion of his soundbite to once again reassert the whole notion of liberty and freedom.
You live your life.
You are control of your life.
You determine where you're going in your life.
You determine what you're going to be.
You determine where you're going to end up.
You determine how successful you're going to be.
You determine how your health care is going to be handled.
You determine how much you're going to get.
You determine when you go to the doctor.
You determine when you opt for a procedure.
You determine control is just another word for freedom in this case.
And we've lost it in healthcare, and we're losing it in so many other places as well.
I think the numbers here, 6%, let's see here.
U.S. healthcare spending is around 18% of GDP, which is higher than any other name.
18% of our GDP is healthcare spending.
And frankly, I thought it was higher than that.
The federal government currently spends almost 6% of GDP on healthcare.
So a third of all health care spending is by government and growing.
So what Dr. Carson's plan is: take that money that's already in the healthcare system that's coming out of your pocket in the form of taxes, Medicare tax, Medicaid tax, income tax, all that, and just you keep it instead of sending it to Washington.
Novel concept.
You keep it.
It's yours in the first place.
You earned it.
Goes in your health savings account.
Get sick, you spend it.
Don't get sick, you don't spend it.
Continues to grow.
You don't go to the doctor every day.
You don't go to the doctor every month.
You don't go to the doctor for a hangnail.
You don't go to the doctor for common cold.
You don't go to the drugstore and get a prescription every week for something you don't need because you're paying for it now.
Well, the dirty little secret is you're paying for it every day anyway.
You just don't know it because you don't have direct relationships with healthcare providers, their intermediaries, insurance companies, government, Medicare, Medicaid, you name it.
But healthcare is like any other product or service.
If the consumer is in charge of spending the money on it, then the market will make sure that it is affordable.
I love to use the hotel examples.
We've got hotels in this country that rent by the hour up to $25,000 a night.
Maybe more than that.
I don't know.
We got rental homes.
You can rent a private island for $300,000 a week if you've got the money.
And if you want, if you want.
If you can't afford that, there's Motel 6 where they leave the light on for you.
But whatever you can afford is there.
That doesn't exist in healthcare because you don't have a direct relationship with the provider.
And until that direct relationship exists, costs can never come down.
By law of economics and math, they can't come down.
When you determine whether money is going to be spent on something, then market forces intercede to make sure that prices charged you are attractive to separate you from your money.
It's that simple.
Market economics.
You know, it works every time it's tried, kind of like abstinence.
Works every time it's tried.
Obama doesn't like hearing that either.
Okay, that's it for that.
There's nothing more to be said.
All there is is disappointment.
And well, it is this.
That's why I got this tingey feeling here.
It's just, it's, you know, one of these what could have beens.
And it still can be.
I know the future is not over.
It's actually encouraging.
Talk about a tingly feeling up your leg.
I got it from Dr. Benjamin Carson.
Hey, one more thing on this, folks, before we move on to the low information news.
We got some out there today about Selena Gomez and Lindsay Lohan's had to move back home to Staten Island.
Did you know that?
She is short of cash.
Lindsay Low.
What?
What did I say?
Long Island, Staten Island.
What's the difference?
It's New York.
She's got to move back home.
No, you know, you stupid people want to be nitpicky with me here.
Long Island, Staten Island, who outside of the difference knows who what difference does it make?
Anyway, we got that.
We've got restrictions on no boobs, no breastfeeding at the Grammys.
No wardrobe mouth, folks.
CBS has come out with some restrictions here.
There's all kinds of exciting stuff out there happening.
But look, Paul Krugman is an Obamaite.
He's an economist.
He's a Nobel Prize-winning economist, folks, which tells you everything you need to know about the Nobel Prize.
New York Times columnist economist, and he took a few questions at a lecture that he gave last week, took a few questions from the audience.
And one question was on America's massive and rising national debt.
And Krugman admitted that the debt will pose a problem eventually.
Not yet.
Not until we get the next Republican president.
Will the debt be a problem?
And he said he admitted it's going to be tough to pay for entitlement programs with an aging population and increasing health care costs.
Now, please pay attention.
Look at me here because Krugman is considered a near-godlike figure on the left.
Krugman is an Obamaite.
When Krugman speaks, it may as well be the Democrat Party, the regime, and he has acolytes.
So he admits it's going to be tough to pay for entitlement programs because the population is getting older and healthcare costs are rising.
Krugman told this audience that we're going to need more revenue in order to handle these problems.
And he then took a stab at explaining where we're going to get the revenue.
And the first thing he said was, we're going to have to raise taxes on the middle class.
Now, if Paul Krugman is saying it, bank on the fact that it's already in the works on the Democrat side.
It is going to happen.
Middle class is already paying higher taxes, by the way, which is the email I read to you at the beginning of the program.
Krugman then said, we're also going to have to make tough decisions about health care.
Specifically, Paul Krugman said, paying for care that has no demonstrated medical benefit is going to have to stop.
Meaning treatment for old people who are going to die anyway has to stop.
That's what this means.
The solution, Krugman says, is death panels and sales taxes.
In quotes, that's what he said.
Death panels and sales taxes is how we handle rising debt and rising health care costs.
Now, do you remember Obama and every other liberal going nuts over the accusation by Sarah Palin that there would be death panels?
Everybody in the media, the Democrats, went nuts and said there's no such thing, and Palin was lying, and how dare she say this kind of thing.
Remember their promises under Obamacare that you'd be able to keep your doctor?
If you like your plan, you get to keep your plan.
And your premium is going to go down by $2,200.
You remember all that?
Because I do.
And I'm sure you do too.
You keep your doctor if you like it.
That ain't going to change.
You keep your health plan if you like it.
That isn't going to change.
It already is.
And your premiums are going to drop by $2,500 a year.
Obamacare, they said, was going to bend the cost curve downward.
And it's not going to raise taxes.
And it was going to reduce the deficit.
This is what everybody was told in the run-up to the vote on Obamacare.
This is what every American was told in their effort to sell this.
And everything you were told is untrue.
Everything you were told turns out to be wrong.
Everything you were told, we were told, turns out to be incorrect.
Healthcare costs are exploding.
You can't keep your own doctor.
Your premiums are skyrocketing.
The cheapest plan is going to be $4,000 a person, family of four, $16,000 to $20,000.
And we're going to need new revenue on top of the massive tax increases already in Obamacare.
And now Paul Krugman admits, yep, we're going to need death panels.
And by the way, he's not the only one.
Stephen Raffner, who was Obama's first car czar in a New York Times column, same place Krugman works, also admitted we're going to need death panels.
Yet Sarah Palin was made to pay a political price for this.
Sarah Palin, the first to title this panel, the death panel.
Now they're starting to admit it.
And of course, folks, it's true.
It's the only way they know to deal with this versus health savings accounts versus you being in charge.
Imagine you having control over your insurance cost.
Imagine you being able to choose whatever doctor you want to go to for whatever malady.
Imagine you being able to choose your doctor or your provider based on the best price you can get.
Imagine there not being a death panel, denying you treatment because of your age.
Imagine that all being up to you.
It's the way it used to be.
Not to sound like the old fuddy duddy who, you know, parents would tell their kids they walked 18,000 miles with no shoes in the snow to get to school, everything, doing that.
But when I was growing up, this is exactly how it was.
We went to the doctor.
We went to the dentist when needed, and we got a bill.
Now, admittedly, it was a small town.
Occasionally, the doctor even came to the house if my brother or me were too sick and we couldn't get to his office.
But we got a bill.
There wasn't an insurance company.
There wasn't a copay.
There wasn't any of this stuff.
And that's just in the 50s.
Anyway, okay, I've exhausted.
I appreciate your patience in indulging me.
But I'm, folks, I'm really focused on what we can all do here.
I'm really focused on what can be.
I'm focused on what damn well ought to be as the future unfolds.
I'm sorry, I have one more observation.
One more observation to make about Dr. Benjamin Carson.
What is also refreshing, the man communicates in plain English and with simple rationality in 43 seconds.
Remember, Shakespeare, brevity is the soul of wit.
Brevity is how you make an impression.
The least number of words you need to make a point, the more powerful the point.
43 seconds, and we got the antidote to Obamacare.
Plain English, simple, rational.
And in addition to that, he illustrated how to confront and deal with Obama.
Now, contrast that to what's good.
The Republicans are doing when they're out there giving long speeches about how they want to help people and how they're misunderstood and how they're going to reach out to this group and that group.
And we're going to rebrand.
And we need to do a better job of explaining what our policies are all about.
And we need to explain how we really like people.
We have seminars about abandoning principles.
We have long discussions and treatises and people writing long columns on suggestions for the Republicans how they need to moderate here and modify there and reach out over here and do this, that, there, and so on.
And a guy comes along in 43 seconds and sets out a position based on our principles of individual responsibility and free market that is a logical solution that makes total sense to everybody who hears it.
Now, they might have some questions.
Well, what do you mean this health safety system?
Where does it get the money?
How can I spend it?
But they're easily explained.
Those questions have easy answers that are also understandable and rational.
Okay.
All right.
Now to the phones.
Your turn, John in Philadelphia.
Great to have you, sir.
Thank you for waving and hello.
Hello, Rush.
Mega Ditto from the City of Brotherly Love.
I wanted to ask you, as this Obamacare, which is now, as you say, the law of the land, as this unfolds over the next several years, do you foresee us as citizens as we get older and sicker going before boards and trying to defend or justify our right to continue living?
Or do you think that maybe we'll kind of rise up and say enough is enough and collapse this health care system?
Remains to be seen.
To answer your first question, one doesn't preclude the other.
You could have people rising up and saying, you know, we don't do this anymore.
While at the same time, what causes that, people having to go before a panel and beg to live.
And that will happen.
People or their representatives are going to lobby these panels, this panel of these people.
And a case will be made.
Why this person deserves to be treated.
It's either going to be that or there's going to be a manual with guidelines that are impersonal, that are based purely on statistics, and the doctors or the panel will go down here and see how many of the bullet points are met.
And if, say, there's a criteria for 20 bullet points to determine whether somebody gets treated or not, and you got to have 15 of them in order to be denied treatment, and you're at 16 or 17, there are going to be people lobbying again.
What do you mean?
I guarantee you that's going to, people want to live.
And they're not, I don't think the American people, I don't think we've gotten to the point yet where the American people are going to sit dispassionately by while some faceless panel in a distant capital says to the family, sorry, time's up for Nano.
I wonder if these initial panels will take into consideration your party affiliation.
Well, more likely whether or not your family donated.
Well, that's okay.
Good point.
Yes, sir.
And how much?
Don't think that's not going to be known.
It's already known who contributes and to who.
It'll never be proven that such a criteria is selected and used.
It'll never be proven.
But don't doubt you're going to have people who suspect it.
Well, you already are.
If we take this, then the country we know is over.
But if we stand up to it, then the American spirit, I think, still does exist in strong will.
It might take several years to get there.
Well, I go back to this ABC show where the woman, you've heard me tell the story at Infinitum here, the woman asking the president whether or not he would grant her mother the right to live by virtue of getting a pacemaker.
That's not the job of the president.
The president doesn't have that kind of this guy wants that power.
He wants you asking him for permission for your parent to have a pacemaker.
And I think this woman, she wasn't happy with the answer she got, but she's an average citizen.
She's not going to go raise hell about it.
She's not going to make a target of herself.
And most people aren't.
Most people, they don't have a chance against the federal government.
So they're not going to want, they're not going to openly make targets of themselves, not as individuals.
But I don't know that we're ever going to get to see the board, John.
I mean, you ask if you might petition to lobby the board personally, but I don't know that you're going to be granted permission.
I don't think there's going to be a mechanism for every American with a grievance to go before this federal panel.
I don't think you'll have a chance to see the board.
They're going to be faceless bureaucrats.
They're not going to want to be known.
They're going to be like the Chinese Pilot Bureau.
And we never even saw their pictures.
And if you did, you knew that they'd been whacked.
Debbie in Lul, great to have you on the EIB network.
Hi.
Well, hi there, Pope Limbaugh.
I can't believe I'm getting to speak to you.
I am so excited.
It's Pope Evictus II.
I love it.
You are the Pope.
And I think that Marco Rubio would definitely benefit from your years of wisdom, not to mention your wonderful parents and your grandpa, who I got to hear speak on your show way back when.
When he was 100 years old.
Yeah.
100 years old and he'd live to be 104.
I am so honored to get to hear his voice.
It was amazing.
Well, thank you very much.
I really appreciate you saying that.
Well, you are a blessing to our country, and I thank you.
And I wanted to remark on Senator Rubio that I believe I heard a speech from him a couple years ago on the Senate floor.
I watched it on T-SPAN.
It was so authentic.
It was so awesome.
And because of that, I really believe he's an authentic man.
And I think from your question earlier, you said, does it matter that he speaks in two tongues?
And I said, at this time in history, to me, it matters that he can respond to President Obama in dual tongues, not to be confused with lying tongues, but in both English and Spanish.
And I hope that he will listen to you and that he will learn from your wisdom and learn all he can.
Wait, wait, just let me just say, Debbie, I appreciate that.
Let me tell you something.
Marco Rubio is an original.
He doesn't need to be advised on conservatism.
He doesn't need to consult people on principle.
He has them.
He is the real deal.
He doesn't have to consult anybody or note cards or cheat cliff notes, cheat sheets, any of that kind of stuff.
He's the genuine, principled, real deal.
My only question about giving the response to State of the Union show in Spanish is that pandering, will the Hispanics see it as pandering or is genuine outreach?
And I was just asking.
I don't really have a thought or a formed opinion on that yet, but it's something that they announced.
See, as Pope Evictus, the second, Evictus from Obama, I am fallible.
I'm a benevolent dictator, and I am a fallible Pope.
I will admit this.
Snirdly frowning here doesn't think I should have admitted that, but it's about humility.
It's like what Obama was talking about today.
Like, yeah, I don't mean it.
I was just saying it.
Trying to make people think that I am when I actually know I'm not.
We had some interesting things said today at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Benghazi consulate attack, and the drive-bys did cover it, but they're not talking about it much.
But some fairly interesting things were said by people.
We have it.
And we've got some audio soundbites coming up in the top of the next hour.
Now, I mentioned CBS people.
They're televising the Grammys.
And they've told the producers and everybody that's putting on the show to please make sure that buttocks and female breasts are adequately covered.
So why are we supposed to watch now?
For the music?
Have these guys forgotten what year it is?
And Raleigh, North Carolina, great to have you on the EIB Network.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
It's a pleasure.
I just wanted you to know a little bit about Dr. Ben Carson's background.
He is not only the head of the pediatric neurosurgery unit, but he is a world-renowned surgeon.
And I had the pleasure of meeting him when I worked at Johns Hopkins a dozen years ago, very down-to-earth man.
And there's been a movie about his life called Gifted Hands, and it was starring Cuba Gooding Jr.
So He is totally a wonderful person, a great man, and he helps young people.
He grew up in Detroit himself and made it out of that gangland area and now helps the youth of Baltimore when he encounters them when they come into the hospital after a shooting or stabbing.
And he tries to help them turn their lives around.
He's a great man.
Well, I'm glad you called.
I appreciate it.
Grab Soundbite 9 again.
Let's explain 8 and 9.
I'm going to play these both again.
Benjamin Carson, Johns Hopkins, he was at the National Prayer Breakfast today with Barack Obama sitting right nearby.
And these two soundbites are just, as I say, plain English, simple, rational, understandable, straight to the point.
Minces no words.
Listen.
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.
Right.
He's basically saying, Obama, you keep talking.
I want to hurt people.
I've already put money in the bank.
You hurt the producers.
No wonder they take money out of the country.
And here again is what he had to say about his solution to the health care problem.
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.
And we're already spending this money.
We're giving it to the government.
For what?
Let's keep it in the hands of people who earned it or who are going to spend it.
It's their money.
Let's not send it to Washington.
I'll tell you, the simple rationality of all of this is just profound, folks.
It's just profound.
Another exciting hour of broadcast excellence is in the can.
But we've got more straight ahead as the media continues to panic over what they perceive to be a position in which Obama finds himself losing leverage on the sequester.