All Episodes
Previous Next
March 28, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:05
March 28, 2014, Friday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Fighting the ravages of the common cold virus.
Rush Limbaugh pushing through.
Nevertheless, it is Friday, so let's roll, folks.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida, it's open line Friday.
It is the fastest three hours in media.
I am your host, Rush Limbaugh, the most talked about radio talk show in America, the most commented on host of the most talked about radio program in America, a program that meets and surpasses all audience expectations on a daily basis.
That is no mean feat either.
Just great to be with you.
The phone number as we head into the weekend is 800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushbo at EIBNet.com.
Public support for President Obama's health care law is languishing at its lowest level since passage four years ago.
According to an Associated Press GFK survey, 26% of Americans support the Affordable Care Act.
Even fewer, 13%, think that it'll be completely repealed.
A narrow majority expects the law to be further implemented with minor changes.
Impressions of the healthcare rollout, while low have improved slightly.
And they go on to say only 5% of Americans say the launch of the insurance exchanges has gone very or extremely well.
The number who think it's gone at least somewhat well has improved from 12% to 26%.
So they're doing everything they can at the AP to find good news here, but there isn't any good news to be found.
26%.
And not to be repetitive, but folks, this disaster has not fully reached people yet.
If you have been subjected to any kind of a waiver or a delay, whatever problems you've encountered up till now are going to be dwarfed by the reality that hits you when your waivers expire.
You're going to find out that the insurance policy that you can afford does not have a hospital in its network, for example.
You're just going to be amazed.
You're going to end up realizing that all this is, is a transfer of wealth.
You know what Obamacare really is?
It isn't about health care.
And it really isn't about health insurance.
It is about continuing to transfer wealth from producers to non-producers.
It is about subsidizing people who are working and earning income, subsidizing people who don't, paying for them to have health care, paying for them to have health insurance.
That's really what this is all about.
At the end of the day, and it's so blatant that when all of these waivers expire, people are going to see this.
Now, these waivers will expire after the elections.
A couple of stories to illustrate what I'm talking about.
First, David Hogberg at the Federalists celebrating another phony Obamacare milestone.
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges had reached 6 million.
On Wednesday, the regime said that the March 31st deadline would be extended into April for people who had trouble signing up to the website.
But that was yesterday.
From today's release, millions of Americans have gotten health coverage through the marketplace in the last five months, and there's still time for you to join them.
But you need to act now.
The deadline to enroll for coverage this year is Monday, March 31st.
Now, wait.
It was just yesterday and the day before that they moved that.
Now they're back to March 31st.
And what's going to happen is once March 31st rolls around three days from now, that will be Monday, the regime will probably say that there's still time to sign up.
And what's happening here is that the administration is making this stuff up as they go.
They literally are making it up as they go.
There is no working program here.
There is no functioning piece of legislation.
This rollout, this implementation is blown to smithereens.
And it really is throwing everything up against the wall on a daily basis to see what sticks.
They don't even know who has paid.
Maybe my all-time favorite statistic in all of this.
They don't know how many people have enrolled, but they tell us.
Well, yeah, we got 6 million, but they don't know.
But they don't know how many have paid because the website does not have a mechanism at the back end to report that.
There is no such back end on the website.
How stupid is it or how intentional is it?
That wait a second.
Wait a second.
They haven't snirdly said, well, how stupid is it to open up a business and they have no idea is paying?
This isn't a business.
They're not in competition with anybody.
What do you mean?
They can do whatever they want.
How stupid?
How stupid?
They've had three years to put the back end in it and they still haven't done it.
The question is long past the degree of incompetence here.
It's long past that.
The questions need to change now.
What is the real purpose?
Why would you build a website that cannot record payment and signify insurance companies that policies have been purchased?
Why don't you have that in the website?
Now, I've got two other things I want to share.
One of them is a column by Ann Coulter, which is really a dynamite column on healthcare.
And the other is a letter.
A doctor has written a letter.
Alabama Representative Mo Brooks read aloud a letter sent to him by Dr. Martin Gill of Decatur.
The letter holds nothing back while detailing the excessive costs and regulations that Dr. Gill calls Obamacare's war against doctors.
Here is the letter.
I'm going to read it to you.
Dear Congressman Brooks, as a practicing family physician, I plead for help against what I can best characterize as Washington's war against doctors.
The medical profession has never before remotely approached today's stress, work hours, wasted costs, decreased efficiency, and declining ability to focus on patient care.
In our community alone here in Decatur, at least six doctors have left patient care for administrative positions to start a concierge practice or to retire altogether.
Doctors are smothered by destructive regulations that add costs, raise our overhead, gum up the works, making patient treatment slower and less efficient.
And this is forcing doctors to focus on things other than patient care and reduce the number of patients that we can help each day.
I spend more time at work than at any time in my 27 years of practice, and more of that time is spent on administrative tasks and entering useless data into a computer rather than helping sick people.
Doctors have been forced by ill-informed bureaucrats to implement electronic medical records that in our four-doctor practice cost well over $100,000, plus continuing yearly operational costs, all of which does not help take care of one patient while it drives up the cost of every patient's health care.
And this is, if I may take brief time out here for a little editorial comment, this is classic.
These high-tech leftists have come up with this brilliant Obamacare plan.
And one of the aspects here is the implementation of electronic medical records, EMR, and then every doctor's office has to do it.
And then it gets so cool.
Oh, yeah, we're going to have everything digitized.
Well, somebody has to input the data.
You know, all this high-tech stuff is fine and dandy, and it really works really well, but you've got to have the data in all this software for it to matter.
And somebody has to input it.
And this doctor's point is we're doing it.
We're wasting all this time inputting data so people can play around with computer programs.
And we're not treating patients.
And it's costing us $100,000 to do this.
And it isn't necessary.
Washington's electronic medical records requirement makes our medical practice much slower and less efficient, forcing our doctors to treat fewer patients every day than we did before this mandate to digitize everything.
And to make matters worse, you know, I can give you an example of this.
When I, way, way back, when I got my, well, it wasn't my first Macintosh, but when some brave new technological advancement had been made in contact databases, and my computer IT guy was just, oh, man, this is so great.
Let me show you what you can do.
And he started showing me how I could.
I said, okay, well, what do I have to do to get all these people I know into that database?
Well, you've got to sit.
And he started showing me how to type a person's name in that field and then the middle name in that field.
I said, I've got to do this for everybody I know.
Well, yeah.
I said, well, that's fine.
I'll talk to you in five years when I have time to finish this.
I mean, it's all revolution.
It's all wonderful.
Don't misunderstand.
But that's not what doctors go into business to do is to fill out data fields and digitize these records.
Mr. Limbaugh, why don't they get off their high hearth and hire somebody?
They don't have the money.
This is the thing.
You libs think everybody has just got a bottomless pit of money like the Koch brothers.
And a federal requirement comes down the pike and people, oh, that costs $100,000.
Fine.
Here's the check.
Go complete my database.
It doesn't work that way.
People don't have that kind of money laying around and they don't have that kind of time.
Now, after it's all done, yeah, it is magical.
But if somebody can come up with a way, you've got a paper Rolodex, you show it to your computer and the data ends up in the contact data, that, then we're talking.
If somebody can come up with a way to enter data into a database without having to type it, then we're talking.
And that'll happen someday.
You'll be able to speak it.
Well, you can now if you trust your dictation program.
You can do that now.
And it's much faster than typing.
But still, it takes the time to do it.
And this guy's saying, we don't have the time.
We don't have the money.
He said, in addition to this electronic medical records burden, we face a mandate to use the ICD-10 coding system.
It's a new set of reimbursement diagnosis codes.
The current ICD-9 coding system was roughly 13,000 codes.
The new ICD-10 coding system uses a staggering 70,000 new and completely different codes, thus dramatically slowing doctors down due to the unnecessary complexity and the sheer number of codes that have to be learned to be attached and applied to every patient and every disease in their medical records.
The cost of this new ICD-10 coding system for our small practice is $80,000.
This is after we spend $100,000 on electronic medical records.
This is again driving up health care costs without one iota of treatment.
The cost of health care is skyrocketing without one iota of improvement in the quality of health care.
You guys have created a massive computer database for the geeks and the nerds to play with after we finish inputting the data.
And we don't have time to treat patients and we don't have the money to do all of this.
Finally, he writes in his letter, doctors face non-payment by patients with Obamacare.
These patients may or may not be paying their premiums.
We have no way of verifying this.
And of course, that's true because healthcare.gov doesn't have any back end.
So people who've bought health insurance don't know that they've paid for it, even if they have paid for it.
The website does not consistently record the payment to the insurance company.
He said, no business can operate like this, Mr. Congressman.
No way we can verify whether we're being paid or not.
How in the world can we stay in business if we can't even determine who is and who isn't paying us?
On behalf of the medical profession, I ask that Washington stop the implementation of the coding system and repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a better law written with the input of real doctors who will actually treat patients covered by it.
America has enjoyed the best health care the world's ever known.
The health care, that health care is in jeopardy because doctors can't survive this war on doctors without relief.
That's just, folks, you might not have any sympathy for doctors.
I don't know.
But it's the real world to this guy and his colleagues.
And for every doctor that has this list of specific complaints comes a patient that will have specific complaints.
It comes a hospital that will have specific complaints.
It comes an insurance company that will have specific complaints.
The point is, it isn't working for anybody.
And none of this was told in advance we're going to happen.
Doctors weren't told any of this.
Nobody read the bill.
It was voted, passed by one vote, more than necessary.
Every vote Democrat.
And they made it a point.
They specifically passed this bill without anybody knowing what was in it so that by the time people learned, it would be too late.
This has been a scam from the get-go.
Got to take a timeout.
I'm going to come back and we're going to start on the phones.
Sit tight.
You are next.
And we are going to start on the phones with Jerry in Phillipsburg, Kansas.
Hi, Jerry.
I appreciate your call.
Hey, thanks, Rush.
18 Wheeler did this to you.
18 Wheeler did it.
Thank you very much.
All right.
I got a question.
What do you think of Bobo Beats when he talks about income inequality?
Well, he's not talking about income inequality because even he knows that's not possible.
So what do you think he's actually talking about?
I'm not really sure.
I can't imagine that he thinks everybody in the country should be paid exactly the same.
No, but he wants his voters and low-information people to think that he wants to achieve that.
This is just another communications technique in the class warfare that the Democrats play.
To complain about income inequality is to complain that the rich have too much money.
It isn't fair.
It isn't fair that so many people have so much more than other people.
And it would be fairer if the rich didn't have as much.
And every poor person believes that.
And there are many more poor people and middle-class people than there are rich people.
And rich people oftentimes will not even dare to defend themselves.
They'll just stay quiet.
So Obama's got smooth sailing.
He can go out and attack the rich.
He can accuse them.
He can imply that they're thieves, that they are cheats.
That you've heard the old saw that behind every great fortune is a great crime.
And Obama and the Democrats try to make as many people believe the theory as possible.
They try to make people believe that whoever has a lot of money didn't come by it honestly, really.
They screwed somebody or they inherited it or cheated or they benefited from luck or something.
They didn't work hard for it.
And this is not fair.
So all income inequality is, is Obama pandering to people in the middle class and making them believe that Obama relates to them, sides with them, understands, and is going to go take money from the rich and spread it around to people that don't have it.
The idea that everybody's going to end up with the same income, not even Obama would dare try to state that as an objective.
It's simply income.
The magic word in that whole phrase is equality.
Let me, as usual, as a student of words, cut to the chase on income inequality.
If you want to know what it really is, it's nothing more than this.
Income inequality is income redistribution from those who work for a living to those who vote for a living.
That simple.
You work for a living, Obama's going to take your money.
He's going to give it to people who vote for a living.
Plain and simple.
Class warfare exploited to the max.
And the reason for this is that the, and this is true not just of today's younger generations and millennials, but throughout history, young people are just into equality.
Everybody being treated fairly and everybody having equal opportunity and equal outcomes and nobody being treated unequally and so forth.
So the magic word in this thing is inequality.
You can put anything in front of it and it's designed to appeal to idealists.
But it's a flat-out straight appeal to low-information people.
And I tell you, it's infuriating to me because we have a political party that's attempting to expand the number of low-information people and have that cohort be the dominant voting cohort in this country so that everything that happens in this country is a result of the preferences of the low information crowd.
We have a political party that is seeking the lowest common denominator they can find to find supposed common ground.
The bottom line is the Democrats have no more in common with poor people than the Koch brothers.
The Koch brothers probably have much more in common with poor people than Obama does.
For a host of reasons.
Here is Nikki in my hometown, Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
How about that?
Nikki, welcome to the program.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
How are you?
Oh, really good.
I'm glad to get through.
I'm glad you did, too.
Thanks much.
I always wanted to call and congratulate you on your children's book, and I'm so glad that you took that endeavor.
Well, thank you.
So am I.
I have an 11-year-old son, and he's one of those boys that is not interested in reading, would rather be out playing in the dirt with his tractors, you know, and he only reads because the school makes him read, and I make him read at home.
Otherwise, he doesn't want to read.
Now, but you understand that that is entirely normal, and your son does not have a phobia, and he does not need medication.
That's right.
Yes, I understand.
All right, good.
Good.
Doesn't need any lithium, doesn't need any Xanax, doesn't need whatever Adderall, whatever they give him.
It doesn't need anything.
He's cool.
No, he's just a country boy and likes outdoors.
Well, I got him your book for Christmas, and I was really glad to find out that it was a part of the AR program at school, which is what they get their points for.
AR, I must explain to the people in Riolinda who themselves have not yet gotten into reading.
AR is the advanced reading program.
Now, how does your son qualify for that if he doesn't like to read?
Well, it's a part of their reading at school, and they have to get, they get so many points for each book, and they're supposed to have so many points in a quarter.
I got you.
I got you.
It's just to help encourage him to read at school.
Got you.
So he started reading your book for school, but then soon he started bringing it home and reading it at home on his own.
We even went to a dusty cloister class, and at the end of class, he had some extra time, and he even brought the book with us.
I was just amazed at how much interest he took in your book.
And then especially after I explained to him that, you know, besides the fictional characters, when they went back into history, that all those facts were true and that those are all historical events that are true.
And then, of course, I explained to him who you were.
And now he thinks he has a bond to you since you're a hometown, a hometown boy.
Well, he does.
This is cool.
So you have a son who was not interested in reading at all and only did it because he had to.
Yes.
And you gave him my book, and he liked it so much he read it even during times he didn't have to read.
He wasn't being told to read.
Yes.
Yes, he did.
And he even recommended it to his teacher and let his teacher borrow it.
And she's reading it right now.
I hope he gets it back.
Yes.
Oh, he will because I'm going to make sure he gets it back.
I'm just kidding.
I just like to take these pleasant jabs at teachers.
Well, that's very, that's a wonderful story.
I'm glad you got through to tell me this.
Yes, me too.
I'm here to get away from that.
You know who else I want to thank.
I'm guaranteed to go buy the next book so he can read it for this next quarter.
Well, I appreciate that.
You know what I want to do?
If you'll hang on, Nikki, I want to send you the audio versions of both that I recorded.
And you can play those anytime you're in the car driving around or wherever.
And it's totally unabridged.
It's every word but read by me.
And it's an entirely different experience.
But I really, you know what I want, I want to thank you because you told him everything and it's true.
He's found it to be entertaining.
It's a good story.
He likes it.
I'm sure I know the characters that he likes.
But you told him that it's true.
It really happened.
And that is important because there's a mission.
I like to call it a mission.
There's a purpose here for these books.
And it's exactly that.
And so you've done your job as well.
And I appreciate the call.
I thank you very much.
And hang on so Mr. Snerdley can get your address.
We already know the zip code.
I already know the zip code.
And we'll get it out to you as quickly as we can.
Here's Stan in Two Guns, Arizona.
I'd say some of the best names of towns in this country are in Arizona.
Sholo, Winslow, and now Two Guns, Arizona.
How are you doing, Stan?
I'm doing really good, Rush.
1989 dittoes to you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Hey, before I get to my question, a quick comment, if I may.
I definitely appreciate your observations on global warming slash climate change, but you've got to stop referring to it as man-made.
You're giving aid and comfort to feminazis all across the world.
Well, so what should I say it is?
Oh, human-caused, because it's caused by everybody, females as well as men.
Well, I don't know that women are playing a role in that.
That's part of the feminazi career.
The women, they're nurtured.
They're not destroying anything.
It is man-made destruction.
But I get your point, Emerald.
Okay.
All right.
Hey, to my question.
You're getting dozens of calls from people calling in about losing their doctors, of which I am one, by the way, and also having trouble finding affordable health care plans under Obamacare.
Now, you know lots of influential people.
You are an excellent, very smart businessman.
How about if you start a health insurance company, call it Rush to Excellence Healthcare, you're going to have millions of people join.
You're going to make lots of money, and the problem will be solved.
Are you kidding?
I'd become the biggest target the regime would have in its crosshairs.
Well, that's true, but you would have millions of followers right behind you who would love to join any company that you start.
I'm sure that's a nice thought, and I appreciate the thinking behind that.
But stop and think here for just a second.
The whole problem with Obamacare is that nobody can do it right.
It is so convoluted that even if I were to try to set up an insurance company, there are laws, guidelines, and so forth that make it impossible.
I have to, just like patients have to do certain things, the insurance companies have to do certain things.
They have to make certain things available.
Nobody has any choice in this.
The choice in healthcare has been stripped from everybody.
Now, I don't know if you've heard about this, and I don't have it right in front of me, but professional athletes have been talked into something that is somewhat intriguing.
What you really are after, Stan, you want to invest in me.
That's really, and your idea was if I started a health insurance company, it couldn't lose because I was doing it.
It would be mine, and millions of people would like to be part of it.
And therefore, you would like to be part of it and share in the bounty.
And what you're really saying is you'd just like to invest in me.
Right now, you can't.
The EIB is not publicly traded.
EIB network specifically is not publicly traded.
There's no way you can invest in me.
Now, there's a new thing that's happening with professional athletes.
It's just getting started.
I'm not sure that I fully understand it.
But for example, Vernon Davis, who is receiver for the San Francisco Fortuners, is an IPO.
Vernon Davis is making himself an IPO.
He is doing an initial public offering of himself and his earnings.
He's got a contract, so what his future earnings are are stipulated.
And he's got additional income opportunities with the outside ancillary things that athletes tend to have a chance to get into.
Endorsements, sports broadcasting, and commentary.
So he's trying to establish, he's going to sell an IPO and allow people to invest in him as though he were or is a corporation.
And I don't have, I think I'm getting it right here.
Yes.
IPO seeks a new way to trade star athletes.
Vernon Davis is first up.
Let me take a break here and I'll get the basics of this and come back and tell you what he and other athletes are trying to do here and see if something like this might appeal to you.
Yeah, just a little horse here, folks.
I don't know if you can even know this that I do.
I feel like I've got to constantly clear my throat.
I apologize if it's that bugs me.
If I hear somebody speak and it sounds like they need a drain in their mouths, they got too much saliva, or if you feel like constantly clearing your throat when you listen to somebody, it irritates me.
And I feel like that's how I sound.
And if I do, I apologize.
They're fighting the ravages of the common cold virus.
And ought to be back to 100% by Monday, certainly hope.
Now, anyway, Professional athletes frequently get traded to other teams, but San Francisco Fortune or tight end Vernon Davis, about to be the first ever to be traded like a stock.
Vernon Davis, an eight-year veteran of the NFL, serving as the litmus test for a risky concept: whether sports stars should be treated like public companies whose money-making potential can be bought and sold on an exchange by ordinary investors.
And I'm only mentioning this because I know that there are millions of you who would love to be able to invest in me.
And you can't, per se.
I understand the desire, but we're not publicly traded here.
But this is, this is the way this works.
There's an outfit called Fantex, F-A-N-T-E-X.
Fantex Inc., they're based in San Francisco, and they're going to operate the exchange and will orchestrate Vernon Davis's initial public offering of stock after getting regulatory approval from the SEC.
Here's the way it works: Fantex will pay Vernon Davis $4 million in exchange for 10% of Vernon Davis' future earnings, including some of his off-the-field stuff.
To cover this fee, to cover the $4 million that they're paying Vernon Davis, Fantex is going to sell 421,000 shares of stock at $10 a piece.
The company hopes to complete the initial public offering in the next few weeks, and this story is dated March 25th, so just it's recent.
Now, Vernon Davis is 30 years old.
He's going to need to make, and I must admit, this sounds kind of shaky to me.
Vernon Davis is going to have to make more than $40 million just to deliver a small return on Fantex's investment in him.
They are counting on him to earn most of that money after his current contract with the Fortuners expires in 2015.
Here's the risk.
Vernon Davis is 30.
When you hit 30 is when they begin to start looking at how few years you've got left.
Vernon Davis is up for renegotiation.
His contract expires 2015, so they'll probably start talking to him sometime this year if they want to keep him.
And if he doesn't get injured, and that will be very important, if he goes through the season healthfully and has a productive year, then he can score big bucks in his final big contract opportunity with the Fortiners.
And if the Fortiners aren't willing to pay Vernon Davis what he thinks he can get on the open market, then he'll choose free agency.
I don't know what his status would be, is restricted or full or what have you.
But the belief here is that Fantex, he's got one big contract left if he can get to it and stay healthy.
And they're betting that he will.
So they're going to give him $4 million in exchange for 10% of what he makes now and whatever that next deal is.
And he's betting he's going to get a lot of money.
And so fans are going to be able to buy stock in Vernon Davis.
And as he does well, they will do well.
If you can buy a share of Vernon Davis at $10.
No, don't hit me with that.
Would you please?
There's no slavery here for crying out.
How in the world can anybody think Vernon Davis stands to make money on this?
There's some people, what do you mean selling Vernon Davis?
Don't even.
This is, you know, you want to talk about capitalism.
What did that priest call it radical capitalism?
This is not radical capitalism.
This anybody's got a choice.
You want to invest in Vernon Davis?
You can buy a share of stock in it for $10.
And you're betting that his earnings are going to skyrocket just like everybody else buying stock hopes that's going to happen in the company they invest in.
What's new here is that it is an individual and not a corporation, even though he may be incorporated as Vernon Davis, Inc. or whatever, but it's an individual.
And he's getting $4 million in exchange for 10% of everything he earns.
And I'm sure that's pretext.
Got to take a break.
▲
Export Selection