Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, Rush is a little under the weather this morning.
Nothing too serious.
He accidentally wandered into a bipartisan debt ceiling agreement deal with Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell and started projectile vomiting.
But it's OK.
He's gone on the Obamacare website, so he should be back in three or four months.
No, just kidding.
Just a touch of flu, a touch of early autumn rush flu.
But he'll be back tomorrow.
In the meantime, direct from my station EIB in far northern New Hampshire, this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, sitting in.
And if you've got the speakers cranked up and you can hear a faint rubbing sound in the background, don't worry, that's just Chuck Schumer stroking my shoulders as he softens me up for the bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform.
It's terrific.
I hear they've got a website and everything.
Usually when I do this show, I get a bit of notice.
So I'm up all night practicing in front of the mirror, but it's all a bit last-minute flying by the sea of your pants stuff today.
So don't be surprised.
Don't be surprised on today's show if there are a few, what's the word, glitches, glitches.
It may be, the show may be a bit glitchy today.
Glitchy, glitchy.
Glitchy, glitchy, yayadada, as Patty LaBelle and Christina Aguiera would say.
Glitchy, glitchy, yayadada.
Voule-vous enrolet, affect moi ce soi.
But we'll try to hold the show together.
1-800-282-2882.
Love to hear from some satisfied Obamacare enrollee if you're out there.
There is one.
There is one.
The president was speaking just now about Obamacare, and he was introduced by a lady who claimed to be the first person in the state of Delaware to enroll in Obamacare health insurance.
So this Delaware lady is the first person in her state, and she introduced the president today.
And his message was, the product is good.
The product is so good.
The operation was a great success, even though the patient died.
The product is so good, even though the patient died on hold, waiting to enroll.
But the president is insisting that it's a terrific product he's got and doesn't really need any changes.
Just a bit of help, there's a 1-800 number you can call.
And Obamacare Navigators, that's the term, HR, that's the official government term, is it?
Obamacare Navigators will guide you through the labyrinth of enrollment.
An Obamacare Navigator.
It's like when you see those Tarzan films and the guys are trying to, the guys in the PIF helmets arrive in Africa and they need to find someone who can negotiate them to the mysterious, far away part of the jungle where all the treasure is.
And they get this little guide, this guide who will guide them to it.
It's like Obamacare Navigators.
They will guide you through the jungles.
And at the end of it, you will see the treasure of the Obamacare health insurance premium will be there waiting for you.
The product is so good, says the president.
Other Obamacare news this morning, the New York Daily News.
I like, you know, the New York Daily News is a liberal newspaper.
It's one of the better liberal newspapers in the country.
But talk about burying the lead here.
They've got a story headlined, White House deems health exchange glitches, glitches unacceptable.
White House deems health exchange glitches unacceptable.
GOP calls Obamacare DOA.
Neither of that sound.
obviously it's not unacceptable to the white house because they've accepted it i mean i love the way they keep the president obama whenever anything's wrong and he says oh this is unacceptable obama always talks as if there's him president obama and there's this entirely different entity across the room called the united states government that he's got absolutely nothing to do with he He is the government.
White House deems health exchange glitches unacceptable.
And that's boring, boring, boring, boring.
He's saying, you know, just the usual thing, or he's it's completely unacceptable to him and his team.
It is his team that's done it.
But one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight paragraphs in from the New York Daily News story, the real story occurs in this paragraph.
In New York, one of only 16 states that has its own exchange, not one person has succeeded in using the site to enroll in a plan as of Friday.
So New York State has enrolled no one.
There are no enrollees in New York State.
Don't worry, you know, New York is obviously just one of those small, obscure, low-population states that doesn't really count or anything.
But it's an enrollee-free zone.
As we saw from the President's press conference, in other states, they're thin on the ground.
They're like the Loch Ness monster.
Just because nobody's seen them doesn't mean that they don't exist.
They're out there lurking somewhere.
And sometimes you get like this lady, the first person in the state of Delaware to enroll in health insurance, comes up and she's there.
I believe there are five people in the state of Iowa, five people in Iowa who have succeeded in enrolling in Obamacare.
But New York State has enrolled no one.
No one.
So if you're out there, if you're out there and you'd like to be like this lady in Delaware, she was the first person to successfully enroll in the state of Delaware and she got to introduce the president.
So if you'd like a sporting shot at introducing the president at his next press conference to explain why the product is so good, maybe you should try being the first person to enroll in the state of New York.
Start spreading the news.
I'm leaving today.
I want to be the first of them.
New York, New York.
My uninsured blues are melting away.
That's the first person in the state of New York has yet to be found.
No one has enrolled.
No one.
This is one of the state website.
By the way, there's always what I love about Obamacare is there, when it comes to excuses, you've got a range of options.
You can go to the federal website, and when people say, well, the federal website's a disaster, they'll say, oh, yes, but the state websites are working well.
Well, the New York State website is not working well.
New York, New York, a hell of a town.
The Bronx is up and the website is down.
That's the New York website.
That's the New York website.
The New York Times this morning has a fantastic phrase.
The HHS, Health and Human Services.
I love that.
Human services.
That's great.
The department said that some fixes, such as a temporary virtual waiting room meant to deal with the surge in traffic, were ultimately more confusing than the problems themselves.
Because they had massive traffic the first week and nobody could enroll.
And then they had 37 people the second week.
They had an 88% fall-off.
So there was no one.
There was no big surge in traffic the second week, and still people couldn't enroll.
And then in the third week, they discovered that the people who had successfully filled in applications to enroll, by the time the information came out at the insurers, all the information had turned to garbage and was all wrong and was incorrect.
So they created this thing.
This is a magnificent phrase.
This is one of the greatest phrases ever created by any government bureaucrat anywhere.
A virtual waiting room on the Obamacare website.
Your government has created a, you know, Amazon, which spent nothing compared to the government to create all its websites around the planet, doesn't need a virtual waiting room.
But the Obamacare website does too.
You can sit there, you can read a virtual copy of a two-year-old edition of Newsweek.
Eventually, they'll advance from the virtual waiting room and they'll develop a virtual doctor who'll make virtual house calls, just like back in the old little house on the prairie days.
It'll be virtual house on the prairie.
It'll be terrific.
But this is what the government has created now.
It says, don't worry, it's not a glitch.
It's just a virtual waiting room.
You're just sitting in a virtual waiting room for days on end.
Anyway, Facebook crashed this morning.
Facebook crashed this morning, the very morning that Obama was giving his press conference.
You can't tell me that's a coincidence, because that's his whole thing, isn't it?
See, the first day he was saying, well, Apple introduced a new smartphone and it has one or two glitches, but they fixed the glitches.
And now weeks go by and he said, well, you see, Facebook, everybody loves Facebook, but even Facebook has a few glitches once in a while.
The very morning Obama was giving his press conference on it.
Who do we blame?
Who do we blame for Obamacare?
The New York Times is one of these fascinating 8,000-word pieces.
Contractors see weeks of work on health site, basically explaining that the creation of this website was this website was put together as a kind of exercise in cronyism.
What mattered, as usual, was how connected you were to the president, how many donations you'd made to the president.
And at that point, the president then awarded contracts, the government then awarded contracts for creating the Obamacare website.
There are thousands and thousands of pieces of code that apparently.
Now, this is a half billion dollar website.
As I said, that's more money than Amazon spent setting up all their websites in the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, across the planet, Japan, more money than all their websites put together.
But if you're looking for someone to blame for it, and you don't want to blame Obama, you can blame CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI group based in Montreal.
They had the biggest contract for the Obamacare website, and they were responsible for the architecture of major parts of the system, but not for its integration.
So I must say, as a Canadian, I take pride.
I take pride as a Montreal.
I lived in Montreal.
I love the province of Quebec, and I take a certain amount, I think I take a certain amount of pride as a Quebecer that we have managed to sucker U.S. taxpayers into getting the biggest share, into giving us the biggest share of half a billion dollars, half a billion dollars, to create a website that is the internet equivalent of a Brezhnev era 1970s Soviet supermarket.
Go Canada, go Montreal, go Quebec.
CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI group based in Montreal, had the biggest contract for the Obamacare website.
1-800-282-2882-Mark Stein Infra Rush.
We're going to talk Obamacare.
We're going to talk where do the Republicans go next after the bipartisan triumph of the end of next week.
And we'll talk last week and we'll talk the rest of the day's news too.
1-800-282-2882-Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Mark Stein in for us on the EIB network 1-800-282-2882.
This is from a line.
What is this?
This is from the Washington Muslim.
During the attack, a publication called The American Muslim, this is a column called The American Muslim by Rahat Hussein.
A group of Americans visiting Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj were threatened and attacked earlier this week in Saudi Arabia.
During the attack, the men reportedly shouted at them, Our pilgrimage will be complete once we have killed you, ripped out your hearts and eaten them, and then raped your women.
Which is a heck of a shumer said to Mitch McConnell during the shutdown negotiations.
Our pilgrimage will be complete once we have killed you, ripped out your hearts and eaten them, and then raped your women.
That was the message that greeted Americans visiting Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj, greeted by their co-religionists, according to a story by the American Muslim Rahat Hussein.
Why is Obamacare?
Why is Obamacare failing?
Because it is a classic story of government cronyism.
All the time, all the time, Obama has made the case that we don't need all these arguments that liberals and conservatives deal in, like big government versus smaller government.
He said, we need better government.
We need government that works.
This is the technocrat argument that Obama made when he came in in 2008.
Oh, big government, small government, these terms are outmoded.
They have no relevance today.
I am interested in government that works.
But government here, particularly at the federal level, big, dysfunctional, too big to fail government at the American level, is about cronyism and it is about a failed procurement system, according to Vivek Kundra, a former U.S. chief information officer, who told the Washingtonian, I think procurement in the federal government is broken.
The company that was hired to build the healthcare.gov database is CGI Global, which, as I said, is part of the CGI group based in Montreal.
Montreal isn't in the United States, in Canada.
So building the website, when you nationalize one-sixth of the American economy, that's basically the equivalent of the entire French economy, taking over the entire French economy, which even the French haven't attempted to do.
So you take over one-sixth of the economy, and then for your showplace gateway website, you outsource it to this company in Montreal because that's just another one of those jobs that Americans won't do.
So this company in Montreal, the CGI group, got the contract.
They had already been fired by the Canadian government for botching a $46.2 million medical registry system in 2011.
So in other words, Her Majesty's government in Canada fires these guys because they can't get a $46.2 million job right.
But the United States government hires the selfsame guys to do a $400 million website and to build the Keystone, the technological keystone of the U.S. Health Force.
This guy is right.
Procurement in Washington is broken.
It's all a racket.
It's a racket.
Nobody, for a start, consider this, half a billion dollars for a website.
And they keep saying now, oh, no, but Obamacare isn't just a website.
There's all these non-website bits that you can partake in.
And we're now going back.
Can call 1-800 Obamacare instead and sit in our virtual waiting room, listening to the virtual orchestra play virtual windmills of your virtual mind until our Obamacare navigators,
our Obamacare navigators, are ready to put you in the birch bark canoe and glide you up the Amazon and into its obscure tributaries deep into the jungle until you reach the all-powerful source of American healthcare and the Obamacare navigator will have guided you to your destination.
Nobody, nobody on the planet would set down to devise a healthcare system like this.
Nobody, just to take the website, nobody who's actually in the business of websites, nobody who's actually in the business of information would set out to create a website like this.
This is government.
This is what government does.
On 9-11, on 9-11, in the system, in the computer system prevailing in the superpower at that time, if a terrorist tried to enter the United States at Derby Line, Vermont, just to take one near me, up on the Vermont-Quebec border, and he was turned away, he could drive 20 minutes down the road to Beecher Falls, Vermont, and attempt to enter there,
and their computer would have no way of knowing that he had been denied entry 20 minutes up the road at Derby Line, Vermont.
That's an American government computer.
That's how the system worked.
Meanwhile, Amazon, Amazon, all over the world, if you're like a guy in a cave in Waziristan and you go on Amazon's French website and you buy terrorism for dummies and Amazon France mails it to you,
and then 12 years later you then try to buy the jihadist guide to self-detonation off the Amazon US website, they will already know that.
They will already know.
They'll say, you may also like flying planes into skyscrapers for beginners.
That's Amazon.
Amazon didn't spend half a billion dollars, and yet they actually came up with a system that works simply and works for everyone.
And the US website, Obamacare, is a glimpse of your future because this is what it is when it is still nominally this strange pantomime horse in which you've got the rear end of private healthcare sewed together with the rear end of public healthcare and it's the worst of all worlds.
If they move to single-payer healthcare, you look at the craziness of Obamacare, the Obamacare website right now.
That is what American life in total is going to be if they actually move this to the next stage as they want to, which would be a system of universal healthcare.
Mark Steinen for Rush, lots more straight ahead.
Yes, Rush is a little under the weather today, just a touch of flu.
But he's gone to see the doctor, a real doctor, not a virtual doctor that you get if you go on the Obamacare website and sit in the virtual waiting room.
He's gone to see a real doctor and he will return live for full strength, Therafluid Up, excellence in broadcasting behind the golden EIB microphone live tomorrow and all through the end of the week.
I was in central Ohio, Mansfield, Ohio, a few days ago.
And just for a day, I was doing an appearance at the theater in town there.
And that afternoon, I was handed a story from the Findlay Courier that was picked up in the Columbus Dispatch.
Donald Miller Jr. went to court in Findlay, Ohio, to ask a county judge to reverse a 1994 ruling that declared him legally dead.
But Hancock County probate court judge Alan Davis turned down his request, citing a three-year time limit for changing a death ruling.
So this guy is Donald Miller Jr. is alive.
He's walking around.
He's flesh and blood.
He's in health, in good health.
He's walking around.
He was healthy enough to go into court and say this 1994 ruling that declared him legally dead was a mistake.
But the judge turned him down.
Hancock County probate court judge Alan Davis turned him down, saying he'd missed the three-year time limit for changing a death ruling.
So as far as the state of Ohio and the government of the United States is concerned, he has to remain legally dead.
Walking around, talking, breathing does not affect your government paperwork once they've declared you legally dead for a period of three years.
So I don't know whether this guy, this is a story caught by eye in Ohio.
I don't know whether it's a common phenomenon in central Ohio, whether it also pertains in the rest of this great republic.
But it may have some advantages because when you think about it, death is like the ultimate pre-existing condition.
But luckily for Mr. Miller, it's the only one not covered by Obamacare.
So he doesn't have to, once you're legal, if you're legally dead, you don't have to enroll.
You're not subject to Obamacare.
You're not subject to the tax, the fine, for not getting mixed up with Obamacare.
So I thought this is interesting.
And you may be seeing a little uptick in central Ohio and elsewhere.
People who decide it's to their advantage to get themselves declared legally dead.
By the way, if you listen to the duller parts of my monologue at the top of the show, you may have got the feeling that you were legally dead.
But don't worry, it should pass.
If you feel, it's like the Viagra ads.
If you feel legally dead, if symptoms persist for over six hours, see a doctor.
But it should pass.
It's just in the flatter parts of the show, so don't worry about it.
But this guy may have the template for the future, getting yourself declared legally dead, and you're not liable for all the tax.
Now, again, just to take back this, look at this tax point here.
They're now talking about how the individual mandate, which the official position of the government and official position of Obama is it's not going to be postponed.
It's not going to be postponed.
How even can John Roberts, our genius jurist, justify a law that fines you for not procuring health insurance from a website that is entirely dysfunctional and that in some of the biggest states of the nation, nobody has succeeded in acquiring health insurance to.
How can you be fined for that?
How can you be fined for that?
By the way, if the American people go along with this, if they consent to pay fines, this goes way beyond John Roberts' ruling on the constitutionality of it.
This gets to the basic psychological health of the citizenry.
A people that agree to pay fines for not having arranged health insurance through a website that doesn't work and on which you cannot in any practical or timely manner acquire health insurance, a citizenry that goes along with that is no longer a Free People's, no longer a Free People's.
And the other thing, by the way, they're now saying, well, he may decide to postpone it for a year, because he's like George III now.
Way back in 1776, the rebel colonists told George III to take a hike.
They kept passing laws, and he kept saying, I'll have a think about whether I'm going to implement it or not.
And the royal prerogative of deciding which laws you're going to actually put into action and which laws you're not was one of the things that drove the colonists nuts.
Now, apparently, it's fine when King Barak does it.
It's lousy when George III does it, but when King Barak does it, there's no problem with it.
So he might suspend.
He suspended this bit of the law, that bit of law.
So he might suspend the individual mandate.
That will make no difference.
Do you think all those people listening who've received notices from their health insurers saying that under the new law, their plan for 2014 can't be renewed because it's now an illegal plan, or they can have the plan, but instead of costing $300 a month, it's now going to cost $600 a month.
Do you think they're going to be either reinstating those illegal plans for another year?
Do you think they're going to be knocking your new plan down back to the price it was in 2013 before they had to jack up the rates for Obamacare?
No, even if they suspend this thing for a year, there's still going to be tons and tons of people out there for whom their premiums have gone up.
This is a disaster on a scale unknown to the introduction of socialized healthcare, government healthcare in any other country.
Let's go to Kim in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
Kim, you're up on the Rushlinbo Show.
Great to have you with us today.
Hello.
I just wanted to let you know that I was able to get on the website here in Georgia and I discovered a whole bunch of little hidden costs that nobody's been really talking about.
And what kind of hidden costs?
There is a prescription drug deductible.
Oh, right, right.
Okay, so you've very hard to find that unless you're looking for it.
So these are all these little things.
This is, I gather, the reason why they want you to put in all your information.
You know, when you go to Amazon and you buy a book, you say, I'd like to buy Dreams from My Father's by Barack Obama, and you click press and it goes into your shopping basket.
And it's only when you've bought some stuff that they then ask for all your information.
With these websites, you have to give all your information before they show you the product.
And I gather that that is meant to be so that the product looks good and is priced to your needs.
But you're saying even with all that, it's still got all these strings attached.
Correct.
But I'm looking at the bronze plan, which on face value sounds really great.
You know, it's $178 a month.
Sounds good.
But then you get into it.
There's a $6,000 health care deductible and then a $6,000 prescription drug coverage.
So the final cost for everything if I want to use this is $14,000.
Right, right.
So you've got it's like $200 a month, right?
Correct.
So that's $2,400, but you've got the $6,000 medical deductible plus the $6,000 prescription deductible.
So as you say, you're up around $14,500 now.
Correct.
And that's, by the way, this is insurance.
Insurance is supposed to insure you against disaster.
It's not supposed to be a disaster.
Because if it is, then at those, by the way, Kim, you know, at those prices, you could, in most parts of the world, you could actually have a couple of long-term illnesses plus a broken leg from falling off the roof.
In other words, the cost uh to insure you here is now the cost to insure you against disaster here is now more than the cost of disaster in most parts of the world.
That's the problem with insurance at these rates, Kim.
Well, and also, they don't tell you this, but if you go out and network for, say, a doctor's visit, they don't cover that at all.
No, that's right.
Well, that's the other thing as well, is they're incredibly restrictive in they destroy the relationship, obviously, between the doctor and the patient because what doctors you're allowed to do.
You can't make your own, neither you nor the doctor can make your own best judgments about the health care needs.
They're trying to nudge you into this.
They won't cover this doctor.
They won't cover that.
It gets ever more restrictive.
So did you actually sign up, though, Kim?
Oh, absolutely not.
And do you have health insurance at the moment?
I do not.
And you're in good health, I take it.
I am in fabulous health.
And where do you think?
So does that, where does this mean?
Are you just going to figure you'll stay in fabulous health and pay the fine, which is whatever it is, $600 a year for the moment?
Right.
Well, I was looking at that as well, and it's $695 in 2016 or 2.5% of my income, whichever is higher.
Right.
And would 2.5% be higher than the $695?
Well, I certainly hope it will be in 2016.
Well, you never know, because, I mean, what we're doing here is we're incentivizing people to actually stick with low-paying jobs or actually, in effect, to earn less money, as Deborah Sanders was reporting in San Francisco a few days ago, where people are actually lowering their income by $2,000 a year to qualify for cheaper plans, or in this case, to be eligible, I guess,
for the minimum fine.
What do you think the solution to this is, Kim?
Because people now say, well, it's easy to laugh at the Republicans, but easy to laugh at the Democrats and Obama.
What Republicans are proposing for?
What do you think we should do for healthcare, Kim?
For me, what I plan on doing is going through, and this is what I've got, called each of my senators and told them, because you supported this and this is now law, I will no longer vote for you.
So you're up for re-election.
It's time to find somebody else who has the best interests of Americans.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, Kim.
And that's true.
Thanks for your call.
You know, Kim is right here.
It's the arrogance of government, this.
It's to assume we've seen now.
You imagine if he did, the plan some of us have always assumed was what was going to happen is that when this collapsed, he would move to single-payer health care, universal single-payer health care, full-blown government health care, which he's always wanted anyway.
You look at this website, and then you figure out the people who brought you this website would be responsible for running a single-payer, one-source government health care system for 300 million people from Maine to Hawaii.
How well do you think that's going to work?
Mark Stein Infra Rush, lots more, and all your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Let's go to Mike in San Antonio, Texas.
Mike, thank you for waiting in the EIB virtual waiting room to get this.
You're welcome.
Thank you for taking us along.
My pleasure.
What's on your mind?
Well, I'm a private practice physical therapist here in San Antonio, Texas.
And I guess it was several months ago, I got a couple of letters from a couple of different insurance providers saying that they're going to start providing insurance plans to folks who are previously uninsured or underinsured.
And they wanted me to sign up and be a provider.
And so I actually called the number listed and asked, well, what about the reimbursement fee schedule?
What are y'all going to pay us to provide physical therapy on these plans?
And that has not been determined.
And so they want me to sign up to be a provider without me knowing what I'm going to get paid.
I also went, therefore, after that and called and talked to several physicians that refer patients to me, internists, general practice, and orthopedic doctors.
And no physicians that I'm aware of even know what the new plans are going to be paying.
So there aren't any providers that I know of to provide this new Obamacare health care.
So because as you say, somebody can say, well, this guy needs an hour of physical therapy from Mike in San Antonio, but no one has told you what they're going to pay you for that.
So you don't know whether you're going to be getting five bucks for that hour or 50 bucks for that hour or 200 bucks for that.
They're not telling you what the reimbursement rate is going to be.
Exactly.
And again, the other thing is it goes for physicians as well.
They don't even know.
Right, right.
And that's the way this is going to go, that there's going to be a flight, unless they determine to get a full-blown single payer, there's going to be a flight of more and more doctors from the system for as long as they can get away with it.
Because if you look at other parts of the government system, actually, I'll tell you this from an immigrant's point of view.
When I immigrated to this country, you have to have blood tests to show that you don't have AIDS and you're not carrying the HIV and all kinds of things that will make you be a drag on the public bus.
And so they say go and see a doctor.
There are very few doctors that are willing to do this.
And a friend of mine, I think he was actually working for the Wall Street Journal.
He went along, he found the one doctor in the greater New York area who would do it.
And the doctor said, well, do you really want to know whether you have AIDS or not?
And the guy goes, no, not really.
And he goes, well, why don't you just give me $50 and I'll write you the paper saying the test is fine anyway.
You know, in other words, in other words, it was so unattractive.
The reimbursement rates for the doctors performing the U.S. immigration blood tests were so unattractive that hardly any doctors want to do them.
And so they've taken that winning model and they've now basically applied it to the whole system, Mike.
Exactly.
Yeah, well, you're probably right to steer well clear on it.
Thanks a lot, Mike.
That's Mike.
He's a physical therapist in San Antonio.
He's got an actual, Obamacare has a virtual waiting room, but if you go and see Mike for physical therapy in San Antonio, he's still got a real waiting room for as long as he's in business.
That's the other thing that eventually will be destroyed here, is that the practice of medicine will no longer be a middle-class profession and people will not want to go into it.
And doctors will take early retirement and will not want to be part of this system and you will be left with a shrinking choice.
Consumer Reports.
Consumer Reports magazine, which rates your toaster and your TV set and is a big Obamacare supporter, big Obamacare supporter for years, now says healthcare.gov is a disaster and stay away from it for at least another month.
So Consumer Reports, which tell you the best toaster to buy, best TV set to buy, says steer clear of healthcare.gov, steer clear of the Obamacare website for at least another month.
Mark Stein in for rush at the last minute, so we're all a bit glitchy-glitchy, ya-yadada here.
But we are doing our best as we fly by the seat of our pants.
Lots more straight ahead.
Argentine scientists are tapping cow burps for natural gas.
Each head of cattle can apparently emit enough methane to power a refrigerator for 24 hours.
This is a fascinating distinction between how the countries that are economically on the rise think and those that are all about the environmental protection.
In the European Union, they're proposing to tax bovine flatulence.
So if your Holstein is standing there in the field passing a bit of wind, they tax the farmer for that wind because the emissions account for a third.
The cows in Argentina account for a third of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions.
So they are now going to be using it as a source for natural gas.