All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 22, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
29:57
August 22, 2013, Thursday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Ha.
How are you?
Great to have you back, ladies and gentlemen.
I mean it.
I can't tell you how great it is that you are here each and every day.
I love being here.
I love being here with you, because we can do this.
We can get this done.
We must.
We will.
It's great to have you, L Rushbow behind the golden EIB microphone at 800-282-2882.
And the email address Lrushbaugh at EIB net.com.
There's this great, great piece.
I must have had five people send me this piece from the Wall Street Journal.
And I'm I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be honest.
I'm gonna be a human being, I'm gonna tell you it offended me every time I got it.
It offended me every time I received it.
But I gotta be bigger than that.
I have to rise above my personal feelings.
And I'm gonna do that.
All right, let me ask all of you, how many times over the course, this is for you regular listeners, how many times over the course of this program have you heard me tell you I do not have health insurance?
Lots of times, right?
How many times have you heard me say, I went to the doctor yesterday, and it was over, I said I want to pay for it, and they didn't quite know what to do.
Because I don't use insurance.
I wanted to use a credit card to write a check, and they didn't know what to do.
How many times have you heard me describe when I've had to go to the hospital for an overnight?
And I paid for it with a credit card, and it cost in one instance I remember telling you $7,000, 12,000, $12,000 less than had I used insurance.
I remember here I am in the sick bed, and before the doctor even came to see me came the hospital payment person, wanting to know how I'm gonna pay for it.
I said, I'm gonna give you a credit card.
Oh, oh God, we love that.
You do, because the doctor's office says they don't know much what to do.
No, this is great.
This is gonna be easy, but then you're gonna save a lot of money.
I said, I know.
And I said, you know why?
Because there isn't any third party in the mix here.
How many times have you heard me say that if health care were priced in a market way, much like airfare is priced or hotel rooms is priced, that it would make infinitely more sense.
How many times have you heard me say that the biggest problem in healthcare is there is no direct relationship between the customer and the service provider?
And therefore there's no competition for price.
How many times have you heard me advocate the whole notion of medical vouchers?
Where you are given whatever amount of money you pay in tax for health care a year, you're given that amount in an account, and then when you got to go to the doctor, you go and you use that money, but you shop until you find a doctor with a price you want to pay.
We have competition in the system.
No insurance company, no third party, clean, simple, just like buying anything else in our country.
How many times?
Over 25 years.
Too many to count, right?
And each time there's a different element to the story, but it always remains the same.
I've over the years, I've made the point that the biggest problem in healthcare is that the costs are totally unrelated to the patient's ability to pay.
And nowhere else in American commerce does that exist.
You look at hotel rooms.
We've go everywhere from uh Motel 6 Thunderbird Overnight by the hour all the way up to $55,000 a night presidential suites in Dubai or wherever.
And there's a market for every price level.
And there's no insurance company, and there's no government.
Same thing with airfare.
If you want to fly First class, if you want to fly coach, if you want to charter your own jet, whatever the market, whatever you can afford if you want to do, you can do it.
And there's no third-party middleman getting in the mix, but you have to be able to afford whatever you want, and what you can afford is available somewhere in the market.
If you can't afford first class, there's a coach ticket somewhere for you.
And there are places all over the internet that will find you the cheapest hotel room and the cheapest airfare, and the cheapest resort vacation.
No matter what it is.
Same thing with buying a car.
You can go out and spend whatever Rolls-Royce costs, or you can go out and buy a uh a mini Cooper for 24,000, whatever it is.
Point is products throughout the market are priced on the customer's ability to pay.
There are actually two areas where this doesn't apply.
One's education, higher education, the other one is health care.
And through these countless discussions have made the point that what has really gummed up the works here is the government being involved, and the government and or an insurance company being the agent who pays, insulating the customer.
And so the customer really doesn't know what things cost.
The assumption is that a third party is paying for it.
That third party, the insurance company, also determines whether or not you get coverage or treatment based on whether or not they will pay for it.
You're total prisoner of the system.
I mean, I've been telling these stories and making these points for many moons.
Mine.
Well, yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, there was a column by Dr. Jeffrey Singer.
He practices general surgery in Phoenix.
It is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
And he writes a column that basically has every element of every story I've ever told you about this.
And I had five people yesterday send me this thing.
As though I know I ought to be bigger than this, but darn it, I'm human too.
I've been making this point for 20 years, and these people, my friends, send it to me as though, wow, this is cool.
You want to see this.
This makes more sense than anything I've ever heard.
And I asked myself, what am I doing here?
And then I realized, well, I didn't write down what I said, except I did.
It was on my website.
But it wasn't in the Wall Street Journal.
It wasn't a column, but it was in my website, and it was in my newsletter.
This is a column about a guy who was treated for a condition and spent $17,000 less than he would have had he gone the insurance route.
Pull quote from the column.
When my patient returned for his post-op visit, we discussed the experience.
It was clear to both of us.
And here's this this is the paragraph.
This is this is what you got to read this.
You've got to read this, you gotta see this.
This is great, this is great.
It was clear to both of us that the only way to make health care more affordable is to diminish the role of third-party payers.
Let consumers and providers interact through market forces to drive down prices and drive up quality, like we do with buy groceries, clothing, cars, computers.
Drop the focus on prepaid health plans, return to the days of real health insurance that covers major unforeseen events, catastrophic things, and leave the everyday expenses to the consumer, just like automobile and homeowners insurance.
Sadly, we're headed in the opposite direction.
Obamacare expands the role of the third party and practically eliminates the role and the say-so of the patient in the delivery of health care.
Will they ever learn?
No, it's good to see this out there in the Wall Street Journal.
And it's a but.
Anyway, here's the piece.
Ever so often I have an extraordinary surprising experience with a patient, the kind that makes us both say, wow, we learned something from this.
One such moment occurred recently.
Gentleman's early 60s came in, had a rather routine hernia, one that's easily repaired with a simple outpatient surgical procedure.
So we scheduled a surgery at a nearby hospital.
My patient self-employed owns a low-cost indemnity type of health insurance policy.
It has no provider network requirements or preferred hospital requirements.
Patient can go anywhere.
The policy pays up to a fixed amount for doctor and hospital bills based upon the diagnosis.
This affordable health insurance policy made a lot of sense to this guy based on his own health and his own financial situation.
So when the guy arrived at the hospital for the surgery, the admitting clerk reviewed the terms of his policy and estimated the amount of his bill that would be paid by insurance.
She asked him to pay his estimated portion in advance.
Now, more hospitals are doing that now because too often patients don't pay their portions of the bills after the insurance does pay.
So that's just a that's just a little aside.
So the piece continues.
The insurance policy the clerk said would pay up to $2,500 for the surgeon.
That's more than enough.
Up to $2,500 for the hospital charges, the operating room, the nursing, recovery room.
The estimated hospital charged $23,000.
She asked him to pay $20,000 up front to cover the estimated balance.
And my patient was stunned.
I got a call from the admitting clerk informing me that he wanted to cancel a surgery and explained why.
After speaking to my patient alone and learning the nature of his policy, I realized that I wasn't bound by any preferred provider contractual agreement, and I knew we had a solution.
I explained that just because he had health insurance didn't mean he had to use it.
After all, when people have a minor fender bender, they often settle it privately rather than file claim.
Now, because of the nature of this guy's policy, he could do the same thing through his medical procedure.
However, had I been bound by preferred provider contractor by Medicare, I would not have been able to enlighten him.
Hospitals and other providers make their list prices as high as possible when negotiating contracts with health plans and Medicare regulators.
No one is ever expected to pay the list price.
It's the wish list priced.
Most people are unaware that if they don't use insurance, they can negotiate upfront cash prices with hospitals and providers substantially below the list price.
Doctors are happy to do this.
We get paid promptly without paying office staff to wade through insurance payment morass.
And this is exactly what happens to me when I go to these doctors' offices.
They see the light that they're just so conditioned to take an insurance card that the offer of on-site payment stymies them when they figure it out, they love it, just like the hospitals love it when we pay off.
So anyway, the doctor writes, we canceled the surgery.
We started the scheduling process all over again.
And this time we classified the patient as self-pay, which is on every medical form I have, that's what I am.
Self-pay.
I grew up thinking it was my responsibility, but anyway, it's another story.
So we contacted, he went to a different hospital.
And they quoted him, since we told them we're going to be paying self-pay upfront, they quoted him a reasonable upfront cash price for the outpatient surgical nursing services.
So he had the operation the next day.
His total bill was just a Little over $3,000.
That included the doctor and the hospital fees.
He ended up saving $17,000 by not using insurance.
Because again, the point is, when insurance and third party payers are involved, the hospital and the doctors, everybody sets this ridiculously high price to cover.
You know, some people do pay it, and that covers and makes up for the people that don't pay their share, patients who don't pay their share of what is owed, the co-pay.
If you will.
So even with the markdown for upfront cash payments, none of the providers was losing money.
At $3,000 for this hernia surgery, everybody involved made a profit.
And yet, had he gone through with it with insurance at the first hospital, $23,000.
Versus, well, $20,000 versus $3,000.
If they weren't going to make a profit, they wouldn't have agreed to the prices, but they did.
With the third party payer taken out of the picture, we got a better idea of the market prices for the services.
Well, yeah, it's what happened.
Pay cash when you go to the hospital if you can, pay with a doctor, and you'll find out what it really costs.
And then you find out that this is the secret, folks.
This is the fix for this.
Just market forces.
The good old free market.
You don't need fancy alternative 3,000 page pieces of legislation that that counter Obamacare.
You just need a little good old capitalism.
It's amazing.
Sadly, we're headed in the opposite direction.
And the doctor says, uh, will anybody ever learn?
There's more on health care, but I got to take it, but it's about the millennials, too.
So sit tight, coming right back.
Wanna squeeze in another phone call here, but I've I've got a way that millennials can help us overcome Obamacare and UPS dropping 15,000 spouses from health insurance coverage.
That's a union company, too.
UPS dropping 15,000 spouses and a university is doing the same thing, dropping spouses from coverage.
That's the only way they can afford it.
Obamacare.
Yep.
And there's such a simple solution to all this.
Here's uh here's Dave in Covington, Kentucky.
Hi, Dave.
Great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Good afternoon, Rosh.
Long time listener.
I hope you're not having any trouble hearing me.
Um have a little trouble on this end.
We had a bad electrical storm a few nights ago, and I think my outside line was blitzed.
I'm running on low voltage voices are kind of low.
But uh longtime listener, sir, since 1990, when you performed the public service of letting us know what Connie Chung was ovulating.
That's how far back I go.
Well, I remember that?
Yeah.
Now that you bring it up, Connie Chung ovulated.
Yeah, there's so much I've forgotten that's happening in this program.
I just want to make a brief comment that I'll hang up while you comment.
It's about these idiots still beating the flocking the dead horse of climate change.
I don't know if I heard right, but it I think one of them said that they'll accept the fact that global warming is slowing down, but they ascribe that to volcanic eruptions.
Rush, volcanoes pump gunk into the atmosphere.
That is the cause of global warming of child climate change.
By their logic and pseudoscience, volcanic eruptions would be accelerating global warming and climate change.
Absolutely.
You're right.
I mean, they're idiots.
By their logic, all these horrible things should be happening in greater number.
I'll hang up, sir.
Okay.
Thanks much.
But what he's saying is hey, nature takes care of itself.
The volcanoes are cooling the planet.
It's you know, this is the thing.
Have you ever noticed the global global warmers?
They're out there warning us.
They're just scared to death.
Oh my god, it's gonna get hot!
It's gonna get hotter and hotter, oh my god, oh my god!
And then it doesn't get hot, you'd think they'd be happy.
Oh, wow, it's not getting hotter.
Oh my God!
It's working, thank God it's not getting hot.
No, they get mad.
It has to get hotter, no matter what the political agenda requires.
University of Virginia, big Obamacare supporters, spouses eliminated from health care coverage.
I know I did.
I know I said at the end of the program yesterday I was going to discuss tea parties, and nobody remembers I said that.
But here's what it is.
It's an ABC news story.
Tea Party blasts lawmakers for fearing town hall Obamacare fight.
What this basically is, we had a caller yesterday who uh wanted to ask me if uh uh Tea Party people Republicans showing up at town halls can actually make a difference.
And what I was gonna say is they're not having the town halls.
They're they're avoiding you.
And this story says uh reports of the Tea Party's demise are greatly exaggerated, or so its leadership would have us believe.
Uh sure the four-year-old movement's maturing and all those attention grabbing headlines, 2009 are much harder to come by in uh in 2013.
What this story is about Brent Bozell, the Media Research Center trying to get Republicans to have town hall meetings.
They're not having them.
The Tea Party people are being shut out.
There aren't any town hall meetings.
We're at August 22nd, and there haven't been any to speak of.
There have been a few.
And when they've happened, Republicans have shown up and given members of Congress what for.
But there haven't been nearly as uh many.
Here is Will in uh Athens, Alabama.
Hi, Will, great to have you on the program.
Hey, Russ.
First let me say real quick how awesome it is to talk to you today.
I'm getting ready to move to Kenya to do mission work for about uh a decade and uh talking to you is uh at the top of the list of things I wanted to do before I left.
Uh I'm a millennial, um youth minister, so my job is to work with millennials.
I I don't think millennials voted for Obama because they bought into his vision of utopia.
I'm sure some of them did.
Um, but I think most millennials voted for Obama because he gave them a cause.
You know, for some of them it may have been nothing more than wanting to elect the first African American president, but but with him, they could identify with some cause, and millennials want more than anything else to be part of a cause that's bigger than themselves, you know.
And the thing is, uh, you know, hopefully now they they see it's a lot of fluff, but that they they want to change the world and be part of something big.
And Ron Paul actually did the same thing.
You know, whatever you think of Ron Paul, he was the oldest white guy in the race, and he got a lot of millennials really, really excited about that's because he wants to legalize drugs.
I'm sure that was some of it.
I mean, you can't you can't take that out of the equation.
I mean, he's got he's no doubt he he connects with them.
You're right.
Well, uh Yeah.
But I mean, he's all for legalizing marijuana.
I mean, that's all right.
You're college students.
I mean, that's nirvana for you.
That's right.
But you know, I I also know, you know, some of the kids in my youth group, for instance, they you know, they got really excited about his talk of the Constitution and and limited government.
And you know, Rush, you you love this country more than I think anybody else.
Well, look, it that may that sounds awful good, but when it came he wasn't in the race, he wasn't on the ballot, and they voted for the guy who is as far away from Ron Paul as anybody in the re-election could have been.
They didn't vote for Romney.
So they they might have been really hip to this uh Ron Paul constitutional libertarian stance, but when I got a chance to vote on it, ain't anywhere near it.
I want to go back to the original premise.
You said that they did not vote for a utopia.
They voted for a cause.
And using a cause with either first African American president or something.
Whatever it was, you would you disagree if I said that they were they thought they were doing something idealistic?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You would disagree or you would not disappear.
No, I'm sorry, I I would agree.
Absolutely agree with that.
It was all about the ideal and and like I said, wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves to change the world.
You know, I I don't think that I I think that they want to love this country, Rush, and and I think that you you're probably in a better position than anybody because you love this country a lot.
Uh I think they'll listen to you.
You know, you've you've got your uh low information voter outreach.
Maybe you have a millennial outreach.
Just go go back to the basics, read the Constitution.
Well, that's what we're doing here.
But you know, the twenty-four and twenty-five-year-old female millennials are scared out of their panties by me.
Uh, and hopefully some male millennials are close by to take advantage of that when that happens.
Um but they are.
I mean, I'm I'm I'm told that they're there's they're scared of me.
What is so what what he laughed.
I said scared out of their panties to a missionary.
He laughed because he knows.
He knows I'm a quality guy.
He understands humor.
See, this is a good point.
This guy's not a stuffed shirt out there.
As Will, he can laugh at this stuff.
He knows that no offense was intended by any of that.
Anyway, it's interesting.
Will I?
Yeah, Limbaugh injects panties into no, no panties.
Uh into discussion of millennial women.
Anyway, let me uh I want to read to you from Bruce for Radicals.
Saul Alinsky.
Uh uh bounce off what Will just said.
He said that the millennials, they were into a cause, something bigger than themselves.
Obama's first black president.
But he said they were not voting for utopia.
So I think I'm gonna respectfully disagree.
I think that's what Obama made a lot of people think would was possible.
Get rid of all this arguing, get rid of all the disagreements, get rid of all the bickering, get rid of all the hatred that George Bush caused, and then get the economy back on track, and everybody liking each other.
I think that's utopia to a lot of people.
But let me read to you.
This is from Saul Olinski's Rules for Radicals, chapter The Education of a Community Organizer.
People hunger for drama and adventure.
For a breath of life and a dreary drab existence.
But it's more than that.
It is a desperate search for personal identity.
To let other people know that at least you are alive.
When the organizer approaches him, part of what begins to be communicated is that through the organization and its power, he will get his birth certificate for life, that he'll become known, that things will change from the drabness of a life where all that changes is the calendar.
In other words, right there in rules for radicals.
Is the is it's spelled out how idealistic kids are attracted to the Democrat Party, which has no ideals.
All they care about is power.
But right there it is.
Everybody wants to matter.
Everybody wants to be important.
Everybody wants, quote, make a difference.
They want to get noticed.
They want to have something happen as time goes by other than just the calendar date changing.
And the rules for radical community organizer holds the promise for them.
I don't think there is any doubt that Obama was remember the interesting thing about the Obama candidacy was it was described as a blank canvas.
You could make Obama be whatever you wanted him to be, because all he was was a series of platitudes.
What, the missionary is going to Kenya?
He told you that.
Oh, I didn't hear him for the when he opened the call.
He's going to Kenya for ten years.
Hey, Will.
Um, if you're still out there, if you're going to Kenya, uh Obama's brother lives there in a hut, like a six by nine-foot hut.
And at last I heard he was living on two dollars a year.
So if you just give him twenty dollars, you have made the biggest difference in his life that you'll ever make.
Um take a sign, home sweet hut.
Um, Obama's grandmother or aunt or somebody also lives there and is the first place to have electricity in the village, or was the first.
But I don't think the brother has any electricity in the hut.
And he's still there.
Because they did a movie.
Remember that?
Who was it did that movie?
It was uh Yeah, Dinesh.
Dinesh D'Souza went over there and talked to the brother.
I think the brother tried to borrow some money.
Uh, but Dinesh took him in town, you know, outside the hut.
Dinesh didn't go to HUD.
Will could go to the hut.
Gary in West Palm Beach.
It's great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, I love and respect you.
I just want to let you know a few things.
First of all, I'm a couple years younger than you, and on August 14th, I celebrated 25 years in business right alongside with you, and I've been listening to you on my headphones ever since.
And you keep me, you know, it keep me going for 25 years, so I really appreciate that.
Congratulations.
Thank you much.
Yeah, and I only live like 20 miles from you, too.
So if you ever want to go bass fishing, I'd love to take you.
Cool.
Yeah.
Um listen, uh, you turned me on to breaking bad, and I was watching the TV last night and the night before, and there was a commercial that came on.
And this has nothing to do with race, but it had uh some children at a football park practicing about safety, and they had it looked like a single mother that brought the child to the park, and then after the commercial, it showed the mother walking away, holding the child's hand by herself.
And I didn't know if she's divorced or married or whatever, but couldn't they have put a mother and a father watching the child walking away with the child?
No, because that in that that see, that's what's normal, and uh it's not fair for everybody to have mother and father.
And since a lot of people don't, you can't humiliate them by by depicting a kid with a mother and father, because a kid without one of the two watching would have feelings hurt.
And and the left is promoting single motherhood.
Gary, I am not single motherhood is a cause celeb in the Democrat Party.
Single mother is a heroine.
She's a victim of a typical runaway, worthless husband, blah, blah.
She's got to be celebrated in a halo put above her.
That's that's your instincts are right on the money when you watch that spot.
Okay, I gotta go home and I gotta try to unbrick my retina MacBook Pro.
It's gonna take me hours.
In the meantime, open line Friday will be on us in 21 hours, and we'll be back.
▲
Export Selection